Pro-ID

This post is part of the Inspiration series, made possible by Veer.com.

This article is the last in the Veer series and it's appropriate to wrap up our series of rather wordy articles with a counterpoint. So far the Veer series has engaged the verbal parts of the brain by talking about concepts accompanied by visual images. The neuroanatomy of visual processing, however, is far more complex. Simplifying somewhat, in most people the right hemisphere processes visuals, the left hemisphere uses words and hunts for reason. Even when your visual field feasts on the bounty of changing stimuli the world offers, the left hemisphere constantly tries to rationalize and verbalize what it sees. For creatives, rationalization is the enemy of inspiration, so perhaps some tools can be found in the world of science to aid in the process.

The corpus callosum connects the left and right hemispheres of the brain and allows them to communicate with one another. To the human being in possession of the brain, however, consciousness is singular and even the notion of a split brain seems counterintuitive. In certain medical cases (mostly severe seizures) the corpus callosum is severed, resulting in two halves of the brain that fail to communicate. At the same time, the human eye is cross wired, such that the left eye connects to the right eye and vice versatile. For a normal brain, the data from both eyes is assimilated and dealt with as a whole, but to a patient who has undergone a corpus callosotomy, some really interesting complications ensue.

Michael Gazzinga and Roger Sperry of Caltech were the first to do split brain experiments and Sperry was ultimately awarded the Nobel Prize. One experiment they engaged in involved lateralizing a stimulus to the right hemisphere showing a command to the left eye exclusively. Amazingly, when the right hemisphere received a command like "laugh," the patient would chortle, but when asked why, the confused left hemisphere would confabulate an answer, such as "you guys are just too much." The same was true for visual images. When images were shown to the right brain and the left brain was given conflicting information, the left brain would provide a rationalization for its conflicting information. The responses were so strong and profound that the experimenters wondered whether this sort of thing was happening all of the time.

Since then, neuroscientists have done a great deal of work on memory and learning. We now know that the brain routinely fills in information gaps with, well, whatever you're already predisposed to think. People really do see what they expect to see. Much like a person attempting to wake from a dream, a person wishing to find inspiration in the world needs not only to keep their eyes open, but also to make sure that they constantly suppress the brain chatter that ever seeks to fill the unexpected with the banal.

This post is part of the Inspiration series, made possible byVeer.com.

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