Lies About Your Brain (no. 2): Creativity Comes from the Right Side of Your Brain

This post is the second in a series uncovering the lies about your brain.

In folk psychology, the two lateral hemispheres of the brain symbolize two aspects of human nature. “Left-brained” people, so goes the theory, are logical and analytical. “Right-brainers,” on the other hand, are the intuitive and creative souls.

Daniel H. Pink’s 2006 New York Times bestseller A Whole New Mind: Why Right Brainers Will Rule the Future led to an upsurge in self-help programs and advice columns dedicated to to training “right-brain” thinking. But when Pink uses the term “right-brainer,” he is speaking metaphorically. 

Artists, inventors, storytellers, Pink suggests, are this century’s new leaders. But technological advances in neural imagery have offered no evidence that the brains of creative geniuses have more going on in their right hemispheres than they do in their left.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, who has spent much of his career studying creativity, writes that what dictates creativity “is not a rigid inner structure” but how creative minds interact with the world. Creativity is often a social activity. It can involve logic as much as it can intuition. Writing a novel may involve daydreaming, but it also involves planning, researching and organizing. Some poets, for example, analyze language as part of their practice.

The best way to describe the human brain is not by rigidly defining its halves and parts but in seeing it as a series of interacting systems as a unified whole. Neuroscientists are just beginning to identify the brain’s dozens upon dozens of networks. Whether you order a latte, fix a car engine, or paint the Sistine chapel, trillions of neural pathways collaborate in the process.

Linking a complex function like creativity to a narrow subset of brain regions, let alone an entire hemisphere, is both misguided and naïve.  

So the next time someone calls you “left-brain” or “right-brain,” tell that person that your many interacting brain systems resist such simple classification.