Utilise your creative brain

One question that psychologists and scientists have tried to answer is "where do our ideas come from?" Even though we are inspired by the world around us, our ideas are formulated in our brain. The human brain is divided into two sides, the left side and the right side. Even though they are connected and work together, each side has different capabilities, making them responsible for different aspects of our thinking.

                The right side of the brain is responsible for our creative and imaginative nature. People, who have a more dominant right side, tend to more artistic than those with a dominant left side. This is because the left side has a child-like nature, as it's innocent, sensitive, experimental, playful, and curious. This playfulness is evident in Henry Moore's sketches. When exploring his ideas for possible sculptures, it's clear to see that he was thinking on the page due to the development of his drawings. Play also works closely with "accident" when developing creative ideas. This is because our ideas become viable when we sketch them out, and any accidents we make when drawing ideas help us to develop new ones. When sketching ideas, it is important that they aren't just doodles. This can be avoided be having a direction for our ideas to explore by having a general outcome for our sketches.

               

The left side of the brain is very different to the right side, and rather than being child-like, it works more like an accountant does. The left side is much organised, and concentrates on clarifying, quantifying, editing, selecting and classifying. Unlike how the right side works towards being playful, the left side asks the question, "What is useful?"

               

Image showing the two sides of the brain-
illustrator unknown-(2009). Available at : http://willamey.blogspot.com/2009/08/pantone-1293.html 
(Accessed 11th January 2012)

                Both sides of the brain are very important in our creative approach. This is because our right side will cause us to think of new ideas and approaches to a creative problem and the left side will then analyses and evaluate them to narrow down our possible successful outcomes. Our brain constantly switches between the modes of the right and left side of our brain as we need to constantly have to evaluate our ideas so we know we are heading towards the best possible outcome. By being consciously aware of which side of the brain we are using, we are able to make the most of our brain's capabilities.