Left Brain? Right Brain?

I’m sure you’ve heard somebody somewhere, especially in the art world, refer to right brain people and left brain people, where one is supposedly creative and the other analytical, one is “good at art” and the other “good at math”. I’m going to ask that we all just stop this silliness. There has never, ever, ever been any evidence of this, and no actual neuroscientist or researcher has ever believed in it.

This is something that was propagated by an uninformed and unethical media in the late 1960s and kept alive by a willingly credulous public. Brain lateralization by function is a thing that neuroscience has been trying to understand, and they have even made progress, but nobody outside the sciences seems to actually care about how the brain really works, especially not in the arts.

We seem to want to hold onto this silly notion of “right brain vs left brain” and refuse to acknowledge the truth, which is that in order to create, you need to be analytical and in order to analyze, you need to be creative. Studies of healthy brains using continuous scanning during a variety of activity show no significant difference in brain activity or lateralization when doing creative tasks vs analytical.

Things that may result in lateralized activity include things like language function and visuospatial processing — not drawing vs measuring, or math vs poetry.

It really pains me to hear artists I otherwise admire use this brain lateralization myth as the basis for how or why their “method” works, or as the foundation for some other philosophy of art, or whatever. Often times, this just renders the entire rest of their philosophy or method invalid, at least for me. Some of the time, it’s just an unnecessary distraction that makes an otherwise useful or insightful art lecture sound stupid.

In all cases, it’s factually incorrect and always has been, so please, please, please, just stop already.