Tag Archives: Neurological Disorders

I’ve just realized where is the important difference between artists and scientists – and probably the biggest challenge of the merging or communicating between these two areas. When we do research, we tend to think in words. When we paint, we tend to think in colors. When we compose, we tend to think in sounds. Our right hemisphere thinks in colors, images, feelings or sounds, while the left thinks almost exclusively in words/in symbols. This is of course an over-generalization, but still I think it’s very important point when discussing relations between science and art. Putting right hemisphere experience into words is so difficult task, that most of such attempts sounds like gibberish. Have you watched TED talk “My stroke of insight”? Jill Bolte Taylor shared her first person observations from the stroke, which turned off her left (logical and analytical) hemisphere. While she did great job (also of not going too much into details), still some commenters were complaining about scientific quality of these observations (or that she sounded like she were on drugs, which is by the way not a coincidence).

If that sound too abstract to you, consider history of discovery of benzene. Kekulé had a day dream of snake  seizing its own tail – and interpreted it correctly. And I believe this is not a single example, where solution to a scientific problem presents itself to a researcher in some non-linguistic form (or rather right hemisphere sends solution to left hemisphere). However, such stories are rare for a couple of reasons: we are not usually aware of the fact that “artistic” hemisphere can “solve” scientific problems, we lack skills to identify and translate such messages, and finally it seems unprofessional to admit that we had a “vision” that led to a successful solution.

I’m not sure about correctness of these speculations. It has been quite difficult to get to that point, exactly because of limits of linguistic description of the Art (I rarely can stand an artist’s statement), so it’s likely I’ve made some mistakes on the way. Therefore I would appreciate any help along the way.