Rightie or leftie - apparently we're both

So I had most of my next blog post written out –

So which are you? And I’m not talking about the hand you hold a pen with.

I bought a book once called ‘Organising for Creative People’ in which there was a quiz to see which side of your brain is dominant. People, it said, usually score slightly higher on one side or the other – I scored 80% right brain. Right brain is what governs the creative side, the part of your mind that wants to play with pictures and colours. The left side is the logical side, the analytical thinker good with logic and numbers. You can see why I needed the book now, can’t you?

Writing, I’ve learnt, is very much a both sides working together activity. The ideas come out of my right brain and I need my left brain to filter out the ‘that’s just crazy’ ones. I need logic and analytical skills to ask questions about my characters, give the story its structure and make sure I keep to my themes. My creative side, that’s where all the really cool stuff happens – where the ideas feed from, where the characters are born, where the ‘instead of that, how about this’ bursts out and changes everything I’d been assuming to be true in the context of my story.

And then, I have no idea why, I decided to google left/right brain dominance and – insert sound of a needle scratching across a record - it turns out that research published this week has totally debunked this theory. It now appears that, whilst some functions do occur in one or other side of the brain, how we use our brains seems to be determined more connection by connection.

All very fascinating but all very unhelpful for my poor blog post.

But it made me think about research – it’s so easy now to find out everything about anything, to justify an argument with a fact or a quote, to be able to talk convincingly about a place you’ve only visited through travel blogs and YouTube. And fascinating when you discover a little known fact about a little known fact and, if my experience is anything to go by, I’d be surprised if surfing isn’t the number one accidental displacement activity for writers. Can you imagine if suddenly, à la sci-fi/dystopian/conspiracy plot, the internet was no more? Apparently the internet has never been for two thirds of the world’s population, according to another little nugget I picked up this morning. Now, of course, my right brain is pinging book ideas at me as if, not only has the internet ended, but there will be no tomorrow - please keep quiet about the fact it can’t be doing this!