You’ve been lied to about how your brain works. I’m sure you’ve heard it before – if you’re creative by nature, it’s because you’re naturally more inclined to use the right half of your brain more, while your analytical friends are hanging out on their left side.
Creative people like, say, George de Mestral, a Swiss engineer, living in Commugny, Switzerland, who, in 1941 took his dog into the woods for a walk and some hunting.
When the two of them returned back to his house, they were covered in burrs.
Now, I personally would have left things at just cursing the confounded things as I tried to get them out of my poor pooch’s fur. Not our hero George De Maestral, though.
As he cursed, he also became curious. He wanted to know how the little boogers seed burrs managed to be so stubbornly sticky.
So he put them under a microscope {#thingstohavehandy}. What he saw were hundreds of tiny hooks that would catch on anything with a loop…like his clothes and his dog’s fur.
Did he say, “Oh, that’s why my poor dog is writhing in pain”? No. {#ofcoursenot #boringstory}
Instead, De Mestral immediately had an “Aha” moment – he made the leap that if he could figure out how to reproduce the design from material, he’d have a new fastener that could revolutionize the world. He spent the next thirty years delivering on that dream. #ILoveVelcro
That’s a creative person in action – connecting seemingly unconnected things and turning them into something insanely useful or clever.
If you believed the lie you’ve been told about right and left brained people, you’d probably think old George must have been camped in his right brain all the frigging time.
And we all know someone like that, someone who can take something ordinary, apply their superpowers and turn it into something not only extraordinary, but something no one else could have thought of.
I’m like that with mystery plots. I can see a good mystery anywhere. Trip to the hardware store? New ways for people to die. Newspaper story about a surge in tourism to the filming sites of the Walking Dead? That’s a whole book plot, baby!
This Lie is Hurting You
If you’re reading a blog on creative productivity, you’re probably like that in some way, too. You possess some amount of creative genious, blessed an cursed to live with your right brain.
Except – it’s all a bunch of baloney. Hooey. Bunk. It’s a great big myth. That’s not how brains work AT ALL.
And this lie is dangerous. It’s hurting you and your creativity. Upon hearing and internalizing this lie you have most likely have done one of two things:
- As a right-brainer, you’ve given up on being proficient and what are usually considered anlytical tasks such as checking things off of to-do lists
- Or, as a right-brainer, you’ve determined you should do exercises to strengthen
the other side.
Neither of those actions allow you to embrace the brain you’ve been given. None of them help you realize that, as a creative person, you need tools that help you tap your creativity in different ways to get things done.
The Right Brain Creativity Myth
The myth that creative people are right-brained and analytical people are left-brained can be traced back to the 1960s when Nobel laureate Roger W. Sperry conducted groundbreaking research on split-brain patients. Sperry’s research involved individuals who had undergone a surgical procedure known as corpus callosotomy, in which the bundle of nerves connecting the brain’s hemispheres (the corpus callosum) is severed to treat severe epilepsy.
Through his experiments, Sperry discovered that each hemisphere of the brain has specialized functions. He found that the left hemisphere is primarily involved in language processing and analytical tasks, while the right hemisphere excels in visual-spatial perception and more holistic, intuitive thinking.
That’s how these things get started – a small nugget of truth. Different functions are fired up out of different segment of your brain.
Then pop culture got a hold of it and assumed that meant if you’re creative, you must spend more time on the right side of your brain. Soon, this right brain theory was everywhere – books, TV, Movies…
But you know what they say when you assume…In fact, the research supports the EXACT OPPOSITE of this – there is NO correlation between whether you are creative and how much of your right brain you use. The brain images don’t support this.
As our understanding of the brain and its complexities evolved, scientists began to challenge the oversimplification of brain lateralization. Advanced neuroimaging techniques, such as fMRI, allowed researchers to observe brain activity in real-time and revealed that cognitive functions, including creativity and analytical thinking, involve a distributed network of brain regions across both hemispheres.
This oversimplified notion resonated with the public, as it provided a seemingly clear-cut explanation for individual differences in thinking and behavior.
As a result, the notion of strict left brain-right brain dominance has been debunked in the scientific community. While certain functions may have a higher representation in one hemisphere, the brain operates as an integrated whole, with different regions working together to support various cognitive processes.
So, that means all brains are the same, right?
Not So Fast – Are you a Top or a Bottom?
No, I don’t mean it like that. This is a family-friendly blog!
A more accurate framework for understanding cognitive functions is the top/front brain vs. bottom/back brain distinction. This concept highlights the involvement of different regions in the upper (cortical) and lower (subcortical) parts of the brain.
Creativity, often associated with “thinking outside the box,” involves the interplay between the top and bottom brain regions. The top brain, which includes the prefrontal cortex and other cortical areas, facilitates higher-order cognitive processes such as idea generation, problem-solving, and decision-making. Meanwhile, the bottom brain, comprising regions like the limbic system and basal ganglia, contributes to the emotional aspects of creativity, motivation, and reward processing.
On the other hand, task orientation, characterized by focused attention and goal-directed behavior, relies heavily on the top brain regions. The prefrontal cortex, for instance, is responsible for executive functions, such as planning, organization, and task prioritization. These functions are crucial for efficient task completion and analytical thinking.
For years scientist have been duking it out over how the creative brain works.
In the left corner of the ring, wearing the psychedelic trunks and weighing in at an astonishing amount of articles, are the scientist that say all brains are essentially, structurally the same. These scientist argue that creative people have just figured out how to use the creative parts of their brain more efficiently, how to switch between them.
And, while that’s true to a certain extent, it’s not the winning story.
In the opposite corner are the scientists who subscribe to the belief that people with a bent toward the creative actually have different structural brains. Their brains actually operate in a different way.
A few years ago, with the help of modern technology, the scientist in the second camp got to do a bit of a geeky happy dance. The researchers at Drexel University had a mic drop moment with rearch.
The stunner in the research findings wasn’t that the top brain was being used to more analytically solve problems. The Drexel crew had been onto that since 2007.
What shocked the research world was that the group predisposed to solve problems more creatively Even when they were laying around thinking about their cat or what they were going to have for lunch, their right brain was in high gear, making obscure associations.
Second, researchers observed that creative people’s brains did something funny – they threw a bunch of alpha waves at the anayltical part of the brain. Alphas are surpressors. When they were being creative, they were actively shutting down the non creative places, specifically the area of the brain thought to conect adjacent things (like chair and table), making it easier to look at wildly connected things – like using burs with hooks as clothes fastners.
George was really a king of his alpha waves.
You Also Might Be a Better Liar
One more study for us to dig into (puts on boots and grabs shovel) about the creative brain has to do with honesty.
Research by Francesca Gino of Harvard and Dan Ariely of Duke showed that the more creative you seem to be, the more “morally flexible” you were and the less honest you were. Creativity correlated to unethical behavior higher than other factors, including intelligence.
Now, I’m not saying you’re an out and out immoral liar (all coaching fees will now be due in advance :~)).
Their theory is that creative people are more able to come up with better creative excuses and rationalizations to themselves for their behavior than less creative people.
In other words, they’re more able to convince themselves that the lie really isn’t a lie.
A Cautionairy Tale.
Usually I’m a firm believer in the school that says we are all mostly ordinary. That in a world of 7 billion people if you are one in a million there are 7,000 other people exactly like you.
So get over yourself. #No-Special-K-for-you.
Because believing yourself special is a recipe for disaster. When we think of ourselves as special, it can give us a false sense of entitlement.
If you’re special, people should flock to your greatness without any prompting from you. They should recognize the brilliance of your words, the promise of your stories or the beauty of your art.
If you’re special, you shouldn’t have to try to sell yourself or your creations. If you’re special, you shouldn’t have to work your hinny off or spend years becoming an overnight success.
#RealityCheck – But you do.
Talent not properly packaged, can’t get discovered. Talent not refined for a market, ends up homeless or eating ramen noodles.
So, because I want you to be able to feed your family and share your talent with the world, I usually tell my clients that they need to throw away the illusion that they are special and start figuring out how they can bring others value.
However, in this case I’m wrong. Creatively-inclined people have brains that work different. We can argue whether it’s nature or nurture. But either way they do.
You Can’t Put in a Nail with a Screwdriver.
If you’ve made it this far in the article, you’re probably wondering what your freaky-weird, lying brain has to do with how much stuff you get done.
Well, clock busters, hold on to your hats, because here we go…
You have to respect your brain.
Your brain is different. You can’t give it the same formula for managing time and tasks that you give the brain of someone who is a methodical, less creative person.
Not only will your brain revolt, but it will then promptly lie to you, in a highly believable way, as to why you failed to get something done.
To change the game, you have to start understanding not only how time management and productivity work, but how they work with YOUR brain.
Which is different than how it works for other peoples.
If you have tried time management systems and been disappointed with the results, there’s a good chance those systems were meant for more methodical, less creative brains.
This isn’t an excuse sheep disguised in Scientific Wolf’s closing
That doesn’t mean you’re off the hook. You can’t wallow around not getting things done saying “well MJ said my brain’s different, so I can’t manage my time.”
Quite the contrary.
The fact that your brain is different means you have to employ creative solutions to the problem.
You have to work harder than other people to figure it out.
You have to review your productivity management profile and figure out where you live on the scale.
You have to get serious about reexamining your habits, schedule and creative process and changing it so that you can finally start producing results.
Because you may be different.
But you aren’t special.
Tell me in the comments if you’ve worked through your productivity profile and, if not, what creative excuse you’ve come up with for not getting it done. The most creative excuse wins a free half hour session with me to help you get it done.
