The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World

by Iain McGilchrist

There is, then, a considerable body of evidence from naturally occurring, or temporarily experimentally induced, lesion studies, from direct observation of creative artists, and from a host of different kinds of experimental studies, that quite consistently suggests not just that depressing the right hemisphere tends to depress creativity, including originality, flexibility and divergent thinking, but that depressing the left hemisphere enhances creativity, probably because the mind is released from tendencies towards the linear, explicit and linguistic modes of apprehension typical of the left. There is in fact direct evidence that both rationalising and verbalising have a damaging effect on creativity, at least during the generative process itself. The evidence on this matter is detailed in Chapters 17 & 18. However, an fMRI study at Stanford is particularly interesting. Not only did it find a negative