It’s now widely accepted that the two halves of the brain have different functions. The left hemisphere is involved in logical, sequential reasoning—with verbal language, mathematical thinking, and so on. The right hemisphere is involved in recognition of patterns, of faces, with visual perception, orientation in space, and with movement. However, these compartments of the brain hardly work in isolation from each other. If you look at images of the brain at work, you’ll see that it is highly interactive. Like the rest of our bodies, these functions are all related.
Legs have a major role in running, but a leg on its own is frankly rather poor at it. In the same way, many different parts of the brain are involved when we play or listen to music, from the more recently evolved cerebral cortex to the older, so‐called reptilian parts of the brain. These have to work in concert with the rest of our body, including the rest of the brain. Of course, we all have strengths and weaknesses in the different functions and capacities of the brain. But like the muscles in our arms and legs, these capacities can grow weaker or stronger depending on how much we exercise them separately and together.
By the way, there’s some suggestion in recent research that women’s brains may be more interactive than men’s brains. The jury is still out on this, but reading about it reminded me of an old question in Western philosophy that professors often give college freshmen to debate. It’s about the relationship between our senses and our knowledge of the world. The essence of the question is whether we can know something is true if we don’t have direct evidence of it through our senses, and the usual example is this: “If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?” I used to teach some philosophy courses, and the students and I could debate this sort of thing in an earnest way for weeks on end. The answer, I think, is, “Of course it does, don’t be so ridiculous.” But, you know, I had tenure, so there was really no need to rush this conversation. A recent trip to San Francisco reminded me of these debates. I was wandering through a street market and saw someone wearing a T‐shirt that said, “If a man speaks his mind in a forest and no woman hears him, is he still wrong?” Probably.
Whatever gender differences there may be in everyday thinking, creativity is always a dynamic process that may draw on many different ways of thinking at the same time. Dance is a physical, kinesthetic process. Music is a sound‐based art form. But many dancers and musicians use mathematics as an integral part of their performances. Scientists and mathematicians often think in visual ways to picture and test their ideas.
Creativity also uses much more than our brains. Playing instruments, creating images, constructing objects, performing a dance, and making things of every sort are also intensely physical processes that depend on feelings, intuition, and skilled coordination of hands and eyes, body and mind. In many instances—in dance, in song, in performance—we do not use external media at all. We ourselves are the medium of our creative work.
Creative work also reaches deep into our intuitive and unconscious minds and into our hearts and feelings. Have you ever forgotten someone’s name, or the name of somewhere you’ve visited? Try as you may, it’s often impossible to bring it to mind, and the more you think about it, the more elusive it becomes. Usually, the best thing you can do is stop trying and “put it to the back of your mind.” Sometime later, the name will probably show up in your head when you’re least expecting it. The reason is that there is far more to our minds than the deliberate processes of conscious thought. Beneath the noisy surface of our minds, there are deep reserves of memory and association, of feelings and perceptions that process and record our life’s experiences beyond our conscious awareness. So at times, creativity is a conscious effort. At others, we need to let our ideas ferment for a while and trust the deeper unconscious ruminations of our minds, over which we have less control. Sometimes when we do, the insights we’ve been searching for will come to us in a rush, like “letting a cork out of a bottle.”
Getting It Together
While you can see the dynamic nature of creative thinking in the work of single individuals, it becomes much more obvious when you look at the work of great creative groups like the Traveling Wilburys. The success of the group came about not because they all thought in the same way, but because they were all so different. They had different talents, different interests, and different sounds. But they found a process of working together where their differences stimulated each other to create something they wouldn’t have come up with individually. It’s in this sense that creativity draws not just from our own personal resources but also from the wider world of other people’s ideas and values. This is where the argument for developing our powers of creativity moves up a gear.
Let’s go back to Shakespeare’s Hamlet. In Shakespeare’s play Hamlet, the prince of Denmark is torn by raging feelings about the death of his father and the treachery of his mother and uncle. Throughout the play, he wrestles with his feelings about life and death, loyalty and betrayal, and his significance in the wider universe. He struggles to know what he should think and feel about the events that are engulfing his spirit. Early in the play, he greets Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, two visitors to the royal Danish court. He welcomes them with these words:
My excellent good friends! How dost thou, Guildenstern? Ah, Rosencrantz! Good lads, how do you both?
…what have you,
My good friends, deserved at the hands of fortune,
That she sends you to prison hither?
The question surprises Guildenstern. He asks Hamlet what he means by “prison.” Hamlet says, “Denmark’s a prison.” Rosencrantz laughs and says that if that’s true, then the whole world is a prison. Hamlet says it is, and “a goodly one, in which there are many confines, wards and dungeons, Denmark being one of the worst.” Rosencrantz says, “We think not so, my lord.” Hamlet’s reply is profound. “ ’Tis none to you for there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so: to me it is a prison.”
The power of human creativity is obvious everywhere, in the technologies we use, in the buildings we inhabit, in the clothes we wear, and in the movies we watch. But the reach of creativity is very much deeper. It affects not only what we put in the world, but also what we make of it—not only what we do, but also how we think and feel about it.
Unlike all other species, so far as we can tell, we don’t just get on in the world. We spend much of our time talking and thinking about what happens and trying to work out what it all means. We can do this because of the startling power of imagination, which underpins our capacity to think in words and numbers, in images and gestures, and to use all of these to generate theories and artifacts and all the complex ideas and values that make up the many perspectives on human life. We don’t just see the world as it is; we interpret it through the particular ideas and beliefs that have shaped our own cultures and our personal outlook. All of these stand between us and our raw experiences in the world, acting as a filter on what we perceive and how we think.