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How Not to Listen to Yourself
This post is part of the Inspiration series, made possible by Veer.com.
This article is the last in the Veer series and it's appropriate to wrap up our series of rather wordy articles with a counterpoint. So far the Veer series has engaged the verbal parts of the brain by talking about concepts accompanied by visual images. The neuroanatomy of visual processing, however, is far more complex. Simplifying somewhat, in most people the right hemisphere processes visuals, the left hemisphere uses words and hunts for reason. Even when your visual field feasts on the bounty of changing stimuli the world offers, the left hemisphere constantly tries to rationalize and verbalize what it sees. For creatives, rationalization is the enemy of inspiration, so perhaps some tools can be found in the world of science to aid in the process.The corpus callosum connects the left and right hemispheres of the brain and allows them to communicate with one another. To the human being in possession of the brain, however, consciousness is singular and even the notion of a split brain seems counterintuitive. In certain medical cases (mostly severe seizures) the corpus callosum is severed, resulting in two halves of the brain that fail to communicate. At the same time, the human eye is cross wired, such that the left eye connects to the right eye and vice versatile. For a normal brain, the data from both eyes is assimilated and dealt with as a whole, but to a patient who has undergone a corpus callosotomy, some really interesting complications ensue.
Michael Gazzinga and Roger Sperry of Caltech were the first to do split brain experiments and Sperry was ultimately awarded the Nobel Prize. One experiment they engaged in involved lateralizing a stimulus to the right hemisphere showing a command to the left eye exclusively. Amazingly, when the right hemisphere received a command like "laugh," the patient would chortle, but when asked why, the confused left hemisphere would confabulate an answer, such as "you guys are just too much." The same was true for visual images. When images were shown to the right brain and the left brain was given conflicting information, the left brain would provide a rationalization for its conflicting information. The responses were so strong and profound that the experimenters wondered whether this sort of thing was happening all of the time.
Since then, neuroscientists have done a great deal of work on memory and learning. We now know that the brain routinely fills in information gaps with, well, whatever you're already predisposed to think. People really do see what they expect to see. Much like a person attempting to wake from a dream, a person wishing to find inspiration in the world needs not only to keep their eyes open, but also to make sure that they constantly suppress the brain chatter that ever seeks to fill the unexpected with the banal.
This post is part of the Inspiration series, made possible by Veer.com.
To see more inspiring images for this article check out Core77's Inspired by Visuals Album on Veer.com and signup for 10 free credits to download your own inspirational images.
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Comments
Some time ago, I read about some of the same conclusions about the left brain (verbal, rationalization, etc) you mentioned and I've thought a lot about it. It occurred to me that it's more fundamental than just verbalizing or rationalization, that the left brain constantly tries to define order, categories, or relationships, and verbalizing and rationalization are merely two of MANY methods by which these definitions are expressed. I realized that if this is the case, then there must be definitions of order, categories, or relationships that can't be easily verbalized or rationalized, but must be expressed some other way: music, art, design, engineering, writing, craft, planning, etc. So, of course, this is "happening all of the time." The best art/design/creations/etc can all be characterized by the their parts and it's whole being consistent with some order, nothing extra and yet complete. Sometimes this order is very subtle, sometimes very obvious. Sometimes the order is something that humans have been aware of for all of history and sometimes this order is something newly "discovered." Sometimes it's . . . well you get the point.
Oddly enough, it's a mathematical phenomena that illustrates it best for me, I'm thinking of Julia Sets and the Mandelbrot Set. Julia Sets (named for a french mathematicion named Julia), observed in the early 1900's, are simply small sections and parts of the what is now known as the Mandelbrot Set. But, of course, Julia didn't know this. His discoveries were forgotten until Mandelbrot, using computers, discovered the entire set. So here is what makes chills run down my spine -- that fantastically complex, yet beautiful, and infinitely variable pattern HAS ALWAYS BEEN THERE, SINCE THE BEGINNING OF TIME! But nobody knew about it until Julia and Mandelbrot. And nobody sat down and said "OK, I'm going to design a Mandelbrot Set."
So this is what the best artists/scientists are doing. They're not creating order, they're discovering order and figuring out how to best express and/or demonstrate that discovery. And to discover, they need to see clearly (right brain) and they need to be able to make sense of what they see (left brain), and then, on top of that, they need to have the tools, skills, and/or talents to demonstrate it.
Ok, that was really long, I'll stop now.