There’s an artist, musician, painter, designer, and creative visionary in all of us. Some of us are fortunate enough to be aware of our ability, for others its hidden. Creativity seems to flow through the veins of some people — and be completely avoided in others. So what if you haven’t been given the fine hand of Da Vinci or the ear of Mozart? There’s still good news for you!

Creativity can be stimulated through a range of exercises designed to push right brain thinking and reveal some of your hidden creativity. The right brain functions in a non-verbal manner and excels in visual, spatial, perceptual, and intuitive information. The right brain processes information differently than the left brain. For the right brain, processing happens very quickly and the style of processing is nonlinear and non-sequential. The right brain looks at the whole picture and quickly seeks to determine the spatial relationships of all the parts as they relate to the whole. This component of the brain is not concerned with things falling into patterns because of prescribed rules. On the contrary, the right brain seems to flourish dealing with complexity, ambiguity and paradox. At times, right brain thinking is difficult to put into words because of its complexity, its ability to process information quickly and its non-verbal nature.

The left brain on the other hand is associated with verbal, logical, and analytical thinking. It excels in naming and categorizing things, symbolic abstraction, speech, reading, writing, and arithmetic. The left brain is very linear: it places things in sequential order — first things first and then second things second, etc. If you reflect back upon our own educational training, we have been traditionally taught to master; reading, writing and arithmetic, which are all strong elements of left brain.

Each one of us has a dominance towards the left or right hemispheres of the brain. Creative people are naturally more right-brained dominant — but if you’re not one of these people, you don’t have to miss out.

Creativity can be practiced — here are some ways how:

One exercise which you should try is to draw yourself upside down with your non dominant hand and then sign it. The point of this exercise is to release our mind from habitual patterns and engage our right brain in a creative task. Our left brain always wants to make things the way we know, but it finds it difficult to engage in this exercise as we are ambiguous as we draw clumsy pictures of ourselves. I’ve attached the scanned picture I drew of myself below. Of course this looks nothing like me — but this is my quick free hand sketch with my left hand upside down!

Another brain exercise you can do every day is train yourself to automatically look for connections between things. For example, any time you pick up a magazine, a book, or surf a website — always think of what new things you are learning relate to things you already know. Beginning to automatically see and make these connections in your mind makes you more creative and allows you to create solutions and new ways of doing things.

If you want to read more on your right-brain and unleashing your creativity — you can check out these links:

Left and Right Brain Painting
Three Effective Left-Right Brain Exercises