Читать книгу The Power of Creative Intelligence: 10 ways to tap into your creative genius - Тони Бьюзен, Tony Buzan - Страница 9

In this Chapter you will be given state-of-the-art information about your left and right brains, and how you can combine the two sides to multiply, phenomenally, your Creative Power.

We are going to go on a supersonic flight over the past 50 years of research on the brain. The journey starts in the laboratory of Professor Roger Sperry in California, and describes the research that won him a Nobel Prize in 1981, and which will make you delightfully aware of hidden creative capacities waiting to be unleashed by you.

In the 1950s and 1960s, Professor Sperry was investigating brainwave function. To explore different thinking activities and their effect on the brainwaves, Sperry and his colleagues asked the volunteers to perform different mental tasks, ranging from adding and subtracting numbers in their heads, through to reading poetry, reciting memorized lines, doodling, looking at different colours, drawing cubes, analysing logical problems and daydreaming.

Sperry had predicted that the brainwaves would be somewhat different for different activities, and he was correct. What he had not predicted – and this finding changed forever the way we think about the potential of the human brain and its ability to think creatively – was the following startling revelation: on average, the brain divided its activities very distinctly into ‘left brain’ (left cortex) activities and ‘right brain’ (right cortex) activities. This is the research that has become popularly known as the ‘left/right brain’ research.

The dominant division of labour was as follows:

Left brain	Right brain
Words	Rhythm
Logic	Spatial Awareness
Numbers	Dimension
Sequence	Imagination
Linearity	Daydreaming
Analysis	Colour
Lists	Holistic Awareness

Sperry also discovered that when the right cortex was active, the left tended to go into a relatively restful or meditative state. Similarly when the left cortex was active, the right became more relaxed and calm.

Furthermore, and this came as a real surprise (as well as a beacon of hope), every brain involved in this brainwave experiment was shown to have all the cortical skills in fine working order. In other words, at the basic physical, physiological and potential level, everybody had a massive range of intellectual, thinking and creative skills that they were obviously using only in part.

By the 1970s, these results had led to an explosion of further researches, studies and surveys around the nature of this untapped potential.

One obvious line of investigation (with which I was personally involved) was to survey people on what they thought about their own abilities, and then to check these perceived abilities/disabilities with their real brainwave-measured capacities.

Here is one survey for you to try yourself.