Get In Proper Balance With Your Brain
With experience comes the realization that our brain is the apparatus by which we think we think.
Q. I’ve been told that, to be creative and innovative, I must learn to use the other side of my brain. What does that mean?
A. To be truly creative, experts tell us that we must interrupt our habitual, super-organized, “natural” thought processes. By so doing, we can trick our brains into side-stepping their natural tendency to build upon what they already know. Without such deliberate interference, our brains are inclined to simply extrapolate our present awareness into “new” knowledge that will not be too different from what we already have.
Edward de Bono, a renowned expert on creativity, calls this process “lateral thinking.” By breaking free of our normal, logical constructs for thinking, de Bono says our brain will be inclined to hook together unrelated concepts, out of sequential order, to come up with new ideas or even produce novel solutions to problems. Lateral thinking requires us to get in the way of our brain’s normal functioning and force it to abandon, for the moment, its pre-ordained proclivity to pattern-making.
To accomplish such cerebral acrobatics, you have to train yourself to use both the left and right sides of your brain. The left side of the brain provides the ability to be logical and to pursue defined opportunity step-by-step. Research has indicated that men (notably professional managers who were trained by business schools) depend primarily on the linear, logical and analytic proclivities of the left hemispheres of their brain.
This tendency to be “concrete sequential” is not conducive, however, to generating new ideas or different conceptual configurations. Typically the “left brain” is verbal, analytic, symbolic, abstract, temporal, rational, digital, logical, linear, sequential, syllogistic and patterned.
It should be noted, also, that thinking too much with the left side can produce less-than-optimum conclusions. Rigorous, micro-analysis of problems or opportunities can squeeze out right brain-based intuition, which provides us with our creative, competitive edge.
When making decisions the brain unconsciously relies on the experiences and stereotypical patterns harbored in its left hemisphere, thus producing thinking that is typically conservative and extremely protective … not the stuff of which creativity is made. It’s like getting your innovative input from your auditor!
From the beginning of mankind, the brain has served as a protective device, steering us clear of dangers (like the big Brontosaurus down the block) and if pushed - even in present day circumstances - it will ultimately embrace risk-avoiding conclusions.
The underused right side of the brain allows for emotionally driven pursuits. It gives us the ability to see the “whole” of a circumstance. By seeing the “big picture,” we can more easily figure out how to benefit from the circumstances confronting us.
Andrew S. Grove in “High Output Management” claims that creative people have an ability “to see something that is not there yet. Like an artist … looking at a blank canvas.”
Here, research shows, women and entrepreneurs of both sexes excel. Positron emission tomography, a sophisticated medical imaging technique, shows that both sides of the brain flicker “on” and “off” when a person is engaged in creative thought, and it flickers most when entrepreneurs are at work.
The successful entrepreneur is generally able to balance both sides in order to tap the creativity necessary to see an opportunity and a means of exploiting it, while also being able to use the left side to devise the methods necessary to organize the resources that are required for implementation. The “right brain” is nonverbal, synthetic, free, concrete, analogic, nontemporal, nonrational, spatial, intuitive, holistic, serendipitous, and unencumbered.