Want More Brain Power - Tap Into the Right Side of Your Brain

The secret to tapping into your unused part of your brain may be as easy as doing a drawing each day.

Drawing is unique in how it accesses part of the brain that we infrequently use.

Scientists agree there are two ways of knowing and seeing things. These are the verbal and anaylitic mode dealing with numbers and words, and the visual creative side dealing with emotions visual images and perception of the world around us.These two sides use two very differnt parts of the brain, the right and the left side.

By Drawing you stimulate the right side of your brain, today we mostly only access our left side - our analytical side. 80% of the population is left-brain dominant just fewer than 20% of all people, throughout history, have been right-brain dominant.

It's easy to see why as our educational system is based on developing left-brain skills: reading, writing and arithmetic.

Right-brain tendencies among children were thereby discouraged, and the minority who actually are right-brain dominant often have a difficult time learning in this heavily left-brain school environment.

It's little wonder so many exceptionally rigth brain creative people, including Einstein, Edison, Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, and Bill Gates had trouble in school!

There is now enough evidence - and it makes sense - to suggest stimulating both sides of your brain increases your brain power.

Sounds easy enough but how to you go about doing it?

First you need to learn how to access your right side of your brain, known as the R-Mode of your brain.

Todays World is not made for R-Mode.

As mentioned above, It's easy to see how we are not used to accessing our right side. In todays world, from our schooling and most well paid jobs we have been taught to more often access only our L-Mode side of the brain.

By only accessing our left side of the brian "We are missing out of accessing a large part of our brain" - From The Fabric of Mind, by the eminent scientist and neurosurgeon, Richard Bergland. Viking Penguin, Inc., New York

Our right brain is our nonverbal and intuitive brain - the way it thinks in patterns, or pictures, composed of ‘whole things,’ and does not comprehend reductions, either numbers, letters, or words. Unfortunately in todays world we are less likely to put value to a drawing in class - it's just seen as a break form the real subjects like maths, english aand so on. These's little reward for using our R-Mode.

It's time we paid a bit more attention to our neglected R-Mode - or right side of the brain.

Learning to draw means learning to make a mental shift from L-mode to R-mode. That is what a person trained in drawing does, and that is what you can easily learn.

How to Really Draw?

It does not matter if you feel you have little talent and doubt you could ever learn. Or you might enjoy drawing but have not been able to get beyond a child-like level. You need to really draw - not just stick figures like what i used to do but real drawing - this is drawing exactly what you see.

There are certain techniques that aid you into drawing ONLY exactly what you see - like, copying a picture upside down - this way the mind cannot trick itself into trying to get around drawing what's in front of you.

This technique and others are on a book by Betty Edwards called - "Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain".

It's amazing as some of the results Betty has been able to get over the years, time and time again her techniques have proved effective.

An artist from Australia is well trained in this techniqe and teaches Drawing on the right side of the brain, Vivienne Nelson does this in her Newcastle Art Lessons, where she teaches on the NSW coast of Australia.