I came across an interesting article in the New York Times. I say this because the article helped me explain something to a writer I was working with.

The writer told me that her teachers, seeing her as creative and different, labeled her as more “right brained” than her classmates. She wondered if that accounted for the ways she approached her work.

I told her that I had not been able to get much from the brain dominance approach, but that I had read about a brain research study that might explain her differences (and that also would corroborate the ways that I worked with her).

In the study, an artist's brain was scanned using magnetic resonance imagery. The scan occurred while the artist was given a sketchbook and asked to copy photographs of six faces. The results were compared with the scans of non-artists.

The results showed that the non-artists used only the back, or visual part of the brain. But the artist mainly used the frontal part of the brain – the part of the brain that deals with emotions and previous experiences.

As I worked with this writer, she began to see the logic of this approach. She talked about various experiences that were important to her. As she related these experiences to her work, she started to see the subtle influences these experiences had on her writing. 

By recognizing her experiences, she began to understand how her creative process was much like the artist's. She saw that she needed in some way to access her experiences in order to develop a creative product. In this way, the brain research made a lot of sense to her because she could apply it directly to her work.

The full article is in the Times of Tuesday, May 4, 1999. Here's a short quote from the article that summarizes the salient points.

“It is here that the study came up with its most revelatory results. The ‘seeing’ process for everyone takes place in the visual cortex at the back of the brain, which receives nerve signals representing light captured in the retina. At the same time, increased blood flows are evidence of increased brain activity. In this exhibition, thanks to the photographs of scanned ‘slices’ of different brains, it is possible to see that, when drawing a face, non-artists in the experiment used only the back of the brain, while Mr. Ocean [the artist] used mainly the frontal part of his brain. And this, apparently, is crucial.

‘For Humphrey [Ocean], the real transformation was taking place in the front, where you find emotion, previous faces, painting experience, intentions, and so on,’ Mr. Tchalenko [the researcher] explained. ‘In essence, the control subjects were simply trying to copy what they saw. But Humphrey was creating an abstracted representation of each photograph. He was thinking the portraits.'"