The right side of the brain controls activities on the left side of the body and the thought processes involved in creativity and imagination. A majority of people mostly think, however, with the left side of the brain. The left side of the brain involves logic, language and analytical thinking. Some experts believe that tapping into the right side of your brain can help you in business—making you think out of the box, be more dynamic in presentation and more creative in problem solving.
Betty Edwards, author of the New York Times bestseller Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, which was just released in its fourth edition, says that people can learn to use the right side of their brain more through drawing. “On the right of the brain are visual, spatial, and perceptual abilities. On the left, verbal, analytic, sequential abilities,” says Edwards. “Skills learned through drawing can transfer to the business world.”
Generally people do think with both sides of the brain as most activities require you to do so, but people tend to rely on one side more than that. When you draw, however, you must rely mainly on the right side of your brain. Once you do so, according to Edwards, you are able to understand perspective and see objects as they really are. This can be transferable to other non-drawing activities.
According to Edwards, by drawing to access the right side of the brain one can heighten various skills. These skills, she says, are:
· Observational skills—seeing what is really “out there";
· Envisioning skills—imagining possibilities, new methods, limitations, new products, new organizations;
· Transfer of skills—Bringing to bear on business problems the component seeing skills of drawing—for example, clearly seeing relationships of part-to-whole and negative spaces (the context of problems).
It is not hard to think more with the right side of the brain, you just need to practice, says Edwards. “Given good instruction, we have found that everyone can learn the basic skills of drawing,” explains Edwards, who teaches five-day workshops on how to draw with the right side of the brain. “Drawing a perceived subject requires the visual, spatial, perceptual functions of the right hemisphere. Therefore, drawing is an efficient way to learn how to tap into right side of the brain abilities.”
Drawing isn't the only way to utilize the right side of the brain. Performing anything creative will allow you to do so. “There are, of course, many other ways, including sports and all of the arts,” Edwards points out.
