Left & Right Brain

Art, Nature, Music & Meditation and the Left and Right Brain 

Synchronizing & Balancing Your Left & Right Brain Hemispheres Bring Enormous Benefits. …..

Art practice, Music & meditation offers your nervous system a super fertile atmosphere, triggering enormously positive transformations in your body and brain. Just as higher levels of exercise force your body to strengthen and develop, the higher levels of deep neurological stimulation and brain entrainment provided through creating art and deep meditation forces your nervous system into optimal performance. Your left and right brain hemispheres communicate to a degree producing what is called whole brain functioning.

Benefits Of Balancing Your Left & Right Brain. Your brain has two hemispheres, left & right: Left hemisphere thinking: Generally more sequential, linear, logical, practical, mathematical, analytical, scientific, and time-oriented. Right hemisphere thinking: More non-linear, intuitive, abstract, big-picture focused, creative, and space-oriented. Most people use one hemisphere more dominant than the other, creating an imbalance.

Art practice, playing a musical instrument and meditation is where the brainwaves in the right and left hemispheres synchronize – literally, harmonize with each other, speed up assimilation and processing, and enhance creativity through “whole-brain” thinking. This may be the foundation for the feeling of well-being that is brought about by creating art and through meditation; a feeling of harmony rather than dissonance; a feeling of unity with the universe and a loss of ‘self’ – typical of an activated right hemisphere.

During art and music creation and meditation, brainwaves slow considerably. As we get deeper into a meditative or “peak experience”  or “flow” (losing oneself in the practice), we go from our normal ‘beta’ mode of conscious control, logical thought and analysis – dominantly left-brain… to the alpha state where the mind and body are in the “flow” . This is the optimal brainwave pattern for inspiration and learning; here, the right hemisphere becomes more active.

Some of the above information came from:

https://www.brainwave-research-institute.com/meditation-synchronizes-the-brain.html

A Right & Left Brain- Exercise  (from Betty Edwards, Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain).

A side benefit of learning to draw is getting to know your own brain a bit better – for example, how, for you, these two modes compete and cooperate.  Here is a quick exercise designed to illustrate the mental conflict that can occur between L-mode and R-mode.

This is an Optical illusiondrawing, called “Vase/Faces” because it can be seen as either two facing profiles or as a symmetrical vase in the center.

When you come to some certain point in drawing the second profile, perhaps somewhere around the lower forehead or nose, you may begin to experience a sense of conflict or confusion.  Try to continue drawing through this moment of conflict, self-observing as you draw to become aware of how you solve the problem.

The solution to the conflict, of course, is to draw just what you see without naming the parts.  Some people are aware of giving themselves instructions, such as, “Don’t think about the features.  Just draw where the line goes in and out.”  Some decide to draw from the bottom up, ignoring the features.  Some decide to draw a line down the middle to help see the relationships.  Some decide to grid the drawing.  Some turn the drawing upside down, to become unaware that they are drawing a profile.  Perhaps you gave yourself entirely unique instructions in order to bypass the verbal system.

In conclusion,this exercise illustrates a main requirement of learning to draw your perceptions: You will learn to damp down your brain’s verbal mode and gain access to your non-verbal, visual perceptual mode.  (from https://drawright.com/try-an-exercise/)

Seeton Painting, 2018