Creativity Isn’t Right-Brain or Left-Brain — It’s Whole Brain

Students come in every semester to my Physiological Psychology class at Hampton University believing that creative people are “right-brained” and analytical people are “left-brained”. They also often hold the belief — the limiting, damaging belief — that being left- or right-brained means one is suited for particular careers over others.

This belief, based on incomplete brain research and misinterpretation of existing brain research, often causes students to believe that they can or cannot do certain things. The belief is that they are preordained with “laterality” (the term for preferring to operate on one side of the brain or the other. This couples with the idea that intelligence, creativity, etc are “immutable”, or unchangeable.

These beliefs are false. Creativity shows a stronger relationship with connection between the two hemispheres than with function in either hemisphere. If one really stops to think, this is actually more logical. Just like musicians have to understand and use mathematical relationships between notes, scientists have to use their imaginations to construct whole new worlds in their minds.

This cross talk between hemispheres is driven mainly, but not only, by the corpus callosum, a thick bundle of axons (think: wires) that physically grows between them. Diffusion Tensor Imaging is a special technique that allows scientists to trace these long axons (wires) and show where they are stimulating other nerve cells. Rex Jung and his team found a difference in connections between the left and right hemispheres between those who were in the top 15% and bottom 15% of a composite creativity score.

But please understand the following points:

1. We are not talking about the difference between “creative” or “not creative”. This is a matter of degrees of creativity. Further, this means that for the middle 70%, there is no detectable difference in left-right connectivity to explain creativity.
2. We don’t know whether this is an innate connectivity, or created by lived experience.

Those two things are really important to understand as limitations of this research.

Of course, this whole discussion often leaves out something very important: Affinity also influences our choices. We are also nudged and pulled by social relationships. All of these factors, not just initial brain wiring, determine what we might be good at.

I often hear people observe a 5–6 year old and say they are “born” with some trait or another. How could we know that? 1,825–2,190 days is a lot of life. Maybe instead of trying to figure out who is ordained by “nature” to perform some skill or another, we should be helping to provide opportunities for learning and pursuit of interests among children.