Too Left

The holidays, for me, are a chance to try and give my right brain a little more exercise. Music, sketching, reading and writing (i.e. imagination). Now, to get that statement right, I had to do a little research (lucky I did or this post would be very boring), and I came across these interesting things about the brain.

Experiments show that most children rank highly creative (right brain) before entering school. Because our educational systems place a higher value on left brain skills such as mathematics, logic and language than it does on drawing or using our imagination, only ten percent of these same children will rank highly creative by age 7. By the time we are adults, high creativity remains in only 2 percent of the population.

Such a shame that the education system does that, but I suppose it must be hard to balance both sides. Also, the brain can only focus on data from one side of the brain at a time, and while we can switch quickly between sides, most of the time one side wins out, usually the left brain. So now I feel sorry for the right side of my brain, and I'm going to work even harder on giving it a fair go. Apparently there are ways to stimulate the right brain, which pretty much involve boring the left side into a doze through meditation (repeating a word or mantra) or sensory deprivation. All the mental images coming from this are amusing me. I think I'll go use the imagination of my right brain by reading...