One Brain, Two Brain, Left Brain, Right Brain
Photo Credit: Artem Chernyshevych
In the 1930's, brain surgeons tried the first experiments in severing the two halves of the brain, in order to reduce the likelihood of seizures in their epileptic patients, and it seemed to work.
In the 1950's doctors started looking into why and how this might have worked. What was the mass of nerve fibres called the corpus callosum or commissure for? Previous speculation had suggested ironically that its purpose appeared to be to transmit epileptic seizures, or perhaps it was simply to prevent the brain from sagging in the middle.
In the end, it was determined that we actually have two brains and the commissure bridges the two so they can work together.
It's very interesting that a split-brain operation gives the patient two separate minds, and it also seems to restrict his or her identity or ego to the left side. That's right – the person you call 'you' lives in the left cerebral hemisphere, which is the half that deals with language and logic. We could call it something of a scientist, especially when we consider that the right brain operates in terms of patterns and insight and might best be regarded as an artist.
Now, writing is an act of close co-operation between these two amazing brains of ours. It seems the right brain comes up with the ideas (have you ever had the thought that ideas just seem to walk into your head? Well, that's your artistic right sending its brilliance over to the conscious you in the left). If you're too tired, stressed or you've drunk too much, the right brain retreats into hazy sleep and you'll find yourself staring at the page unable to come up with any even half decent ideas.
I was busily writing away the other day, coming up fast on the end of the new Michaela and Trisha book when suddenly my mind started squealing at me. You're writing yourself into a brick wall! This isn't what we planned! Stop, turn around, delete, delete, delete!
It definitely wasn't going as I'd half-pie planned it would. Trisha was supposed to be standing up fighting, instead – she was running away!
I'm not a writer who plots books out in advance. I start a new story with a vague idea of what I want it to be about, and a good idea of the characters. I don't make detailed notes about what each chapter will be about. I just sit down and start the story from the beginning and write until the end. Each day I have an idea what will happen in the current scene and I dive in and start putting words on the page.
Quite often it happens that the scene I'm writing heads in an unexpected direction. Or clues or red herrings are dropped in at all the right spots. It feels as though the story and characters are taking over. They're not of course; what's really going on is that the right brain is working full steam ahead and the left is keeping quiet and translating. This is what happened the other day when it looked awfully like I was writing myself into a brick wall. I hate going back and deleting whole paragraphs, however, so I stuck a sock in my left brain's mouth and kept going. At the very least it was going to be interesting to see what happened next.
The weird thing is that what happened next turned out to be far better. Sure the character ran away and the situation wasn't resolved like I had thought it would be, but as it happened, by taking my analytical left brain out of the equation and letting my right brain share its ideas uninhibited, the scene actually turned out better and in the end everything made perfect sense and had much greater depth to it than it would have had I stuck to my original thoughts on how it should go.
This is of course, the sort of thing that happens to us all when we're in 'flow'. Our usually noisy and often fearful ego takes a back seat and the two halves of our mind work in a finely tuned balance.
But guess what? It still kinda feels like magic to me.
Filed under: Writing Journal
