Why is being CREATIVE important anyway?

My passion has always been my creativity. I was born with an urge to create for myself and to share it with others - and now I'm blessed with the opportunity to teach others to find and explore their own creativity.

Our brains are comprised of 2 hemispheres which are joined by a collection of nerves and fibers. The human brain is amazing and fires up in a variety of different areas when we are seeing, doing, thinking, imagining and feeling different things. We do not use one side indepentantly of the other , BUT, depending on the task at hand, certain areas may be fired up more. After years of studying the brain it has been found that rational and linear thinking, analytical thinking and logic, sequencing and orderly processing are mainly the duties of the Left brain.
 
We live in a heavily left-brained world ...which means that from a very young age-  family, media, society, our Governments and other outside influences dominate our way of seeing and learning about the world.  We are trained in a "way" of thinking and analysing.  It's necessary - to a point as it is the way our brains learn to identify and categorize everything, to decipher what is safe and beneficial from what is dangerous and harmful to us. But for me and many others - we have come to discover that there is an imbalance now in the human race- and there is too much left-brained thinking in our current world. I'm not saying it's a terrible thing and we need to save the world (although the thought has crossed my mind !) but that's a little extremist. 

What I would love to see is an introduction of right-brained thinking back into schools, Universities and the workplace. What exactly is right-brained thinking????  Well - briefly, the 2 hemispheres of our brain act in very different ways. We've discussed the left, which identifies and categorizes everything it comes into contact with - it thrives on details, order and control and sees things by purely identifying and labelling them, adding information to it's data base - eg If someone asked a heavily left-brained thinker ,"What colour is the ocean?" They may likely answer ( after pulling out the file of accumulated information on the ocean ) "BLUE ! " 


On the other side we have the right hemisphere which sees the world and everything in it in a freer, holistic way - it is where music, art, intuition, recognition of shapes, spatial relationships and faces as well as empathy, live.  Asked what colour is the ocean- a right-brained thinker might answer," Well- sometimes it's a beautiful greeny-blue colour but then the little waves that form soft curves near the sand have the strongest khaki green and dark yellow in them and where the ocean in the distance meets the horizon - it actually reflects the sky so the water is actually whatever colour the sky is at the time !" 
No one side of the brain is best and remember many parts of the brain will fire up depending on your specific ( and learned) way of thinking and observation- but my plea is for the 90% or so of our world's population who are in left-brained mode way too much to open themselves up to the wonders of what right-brained thinking can give you! 

We have a right hemisphere to our brain for a reason, and some of the leading minds of our time -the world's greatest neuro-scientists have stated that they believe the next evolution in human intelligence will come from BRAIN FUNCTION LATERALIZATION and HEMI-SYNC... which in our lingo means more thinking that uses both hemispheres simultaneously. 

You may think that the technical age we have entered is our saviour and that computers are now doing much of our thinking for us. That scares me -as the old adage says - use it or lose it!  Also - I see computer usage as a great leveler of ability world wide. Once, what one person /company /country could achieve, came from a unique and well-earned creative edge. Now one computer programme has given thousands or even millions of people a common playing field. Anyone who knows how to use that programme ( for example my photoshoppped images of my artwork above) can create something without the entire talent or skill set that was once required. Now, almost the entire world is on a level playing field.


This would alarm me if I was a parent, a job-seeker, a student of any age, an employee or employer or ... a human!!!  WHY?  Because it makes it harder to stand out from the crowd- to get ahead, to be noticed, appreciated and valued for just who you are.  What is going to set you apart and above is your unique creativity - that computers have not yet invented for us.  If the person behind the machine can use their right-brained thinking - their creative mind for their expression then the end result will shine through.  Yet how many of those are out there...how many are surviving most current formal education systems with their right-brain thinking intact and free of cobwebs?   From one of the greatest, most influential and creative minds of our time I'd like to end my rant on his quotes ... and knowing it comes from someone within the traditionally "left-brained world" of computers" is worth noting.......

“He made computers accessible to low-tech cartoonists like me!”
Even during Apple’s leanest years — when its market share was growing perilously low — thousands of artists and graphic designers remained loyal to the company’s hardware, software and creative capabilities.
At the root of all this was Jobs’s uncommon tech-world understanding of artistic elegance.
For decades, his appreciation of visual brilliance radiated and resonated through his words.
(MICHAEL CAVNA - The Washington Post writing about Steve Jobs)


QUOTES FROM STEVE JOBS
"Picasso had a saying. He said, 'Good artists copy, great artists steal.’ And we have always been shameless about stealing great ideas and I think part of what made the Macintosh great was that the people working on it were musicians and poets and artists and zoologists and historians who also happened to be the best computer scientists in the world."
— PBS’s "Triumph of the Nerds: The Rise of Accidental Empires” (1996)

“People from technology don't understand the creative process that these companies go through to make their products, and they don't appreciate how hard it is. And the creative companies don't appreciate how creative technology is; they think it's just something you buy. And so there is a gulf of understanding between the two of them.”
— Wall Street Journal