Exercising Our Creative Muscles

Exercising our creative faculties: stories, silence, and Janusian thinking. Although the human brain possesses the mechanism for lateral thinking and creative insight, there are inherent difficulties in cultivating this skill. In addition to the culture bias toward more predominant thought processes, we have also learned that the brain tends to move toward left hemisphere thought processing as we age. Therefore, in order to exercise our creative thinking faculties, a conscious effort must be made to actively engage the right hemisphere.

In light of the role the right hemisphere plays in prosody and non-literal interpretation, research indicates that it can be exercised through activities requiring extensive exploration of multiple meaning and use of the imagination. In one study, subjects were given folktales and technical materials to read. While reading the folktales, the right hemisphere appeared much more active than when reading the technical materials (Ornstein, 1997, p 73). Comparable results occurred for subjects reading Sufi wisdom stories (Ornstein, 1997, p. 90). On the other hand, participating in activities nonverbally has shown to suppress left hemisphere activity.

In a broad sense, suppressing left hemisphere activity may help reduce the activation or priming of our dominant neural networks, thereby providing us with the conceptual space to make creative associations. Reading stories may exercise the intellectual faculties needed for these associations since they invite us to hold multiple meanings through non-literal interpretation; a function of the right hemisphere. To this later point, Arthur Rothenberg, a clinical professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, provides an interesting theory of creativity. Rothenberg asserts that creative individuals in all disciplines (literature, music, science, mathematics, etc.) seem capable of engaging in a “translogical process” that he calls Janusian thinking. In short, they all display the ability to hold opposite ideas concurrently, and are able to “superimpose elements from many different spatial and temporal dimensions” (Restak, 1994, p.166). Though there are not many studies to convincingly support this theory, it seems congruous with our understanding of vertical and lateral thinking. The neural firing patterns of our left hemisphere provide us with the ability to make quick judgments and therefore limit our perception to the one literal, dominant pattern. Meanwhile, the neural structures of our right hemisphere provide us with the ability to access multiple perceptions and meanings, which may include the ability to conceive of antithesis.