Take five seconds and try this.
I’ve claimed a number of times that we’re not using our R-mode facilities as well as we might. Well, we’re going to do a little experiment now to prove that and see how to deliberately get into a pure R-mode cognitive state.
I’ve given many talks across the United States and Europe based on the material that became this book. One of my favorite bits from the talks is a simple survey question I ask the audience: tell me how well you can draw. The results are always the same.
In a crowd of 100 technical types (programmers, testers, and managers), maybe one or two folks claim to be able to draw very well. Maybe another five to eight or so claim somewhat competent drawing skills but nothing suitable for framing. The vast majority in every case agrees with my own self-assessment: we suck at drawing. Just plain stink. There’s a reason for that.
Drawing is an R-mode activity. Actually, let me back up a moment and describe what I mean by drawing. Drawing really isn’t about making marks on paper. Anyone with normal physical abilities can put the appropriate marks on paper as required for drawing and sketching. The hard part isn’t the drawing end; it’s the seeing. And this sort of visual perception is very much an R-mode task.
“Drawing” is really about seeing.
The essence of the problem is that shared bus I showed you a while back (in Chapter 3, This Is Your Brain). The L-mode is sitting there chatting away, actively blocking the R-mode from doing its job. And interestingly enough, many popular leisure-time activities can engage an R-mode flow that shuts down the chatter of the L-mode: listening to music, drawing, meditation, jogging, needlework, rock climbing, and so on.
To access the perceptual R-mode of the brain, it’s necessary to present the brain with a job that the verbal, analytic L-mode will turn down. Or as Jerre Levy (prominent Caltech student of Sperry) says, you want to look at “setting up conditions that cause you to make a mental shift to a different mode of information processing—the slightly altered state of consciousness—that enables you to see well.”
In the late 1970s, art teacher Dr. Betty Edwards wrote the seminal work Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain. It quickly became a very popular technique to teach drawing and sketching to those of us who weren’t quite getting it. Expanding on the work of Sperry, Edwards realized that the reason many people have difficulty drawing is because of the cognitive interference from the dominant L-mode.
Limit cognitive interference.
The L-mode is a symbolic machine; it rushes in quickly to provide a symbolic representation for some sensory input. That’s great for symbolic activities such as reading and writing but is not appropriate for other activities.
For instance, here’s a quick quiz for you. Get a piece of paper and a pencil. In five seconds, draw your house.
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Take five seconds and try this. |
I’m guessing you drew something like Figure 10, Is This Your House?.
Now tell me truthfully, does your house really look like that? Unless you live in Flatland,[51] that is not an accurate picture of your house. Your ever-helpful L-mode is rushing in and screaming, “House! I know that one! It’s a box with a triangle on top.”
It’s not your house any more than a stick figure looks like a person. It’s a symbol, a convenient shorthand representation for the real thing. But oftentimes you don’t want the trite symbol; you want to perceive the real thing—when drawing or perhaps when interviewing users to gather requirements.
It was Dr. Edwards who first suggested that to get at the real perception you need to shut down the L-mode and let the R-mode do the task for which it is best suited. To accomplish this, she recommends an exercise similar to the following to help you experience a cognitive shift.
This exercise will show you what R-mode feels like. There are only a few rules:
It’s very important that you not name any features you think you see—that’s the hard part. Try to just focus on the lines and their relationships.
When you’re done, turn the picture right-side up and you might be quite surprised at the result.
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Try this before reading on. |
Why does this work?
It works because you’ve given your L-mode a job it doesn’t want. By consistently refusing to name the parts you see, the L-mode finally gives up. This isn’t a task it can handle, so it gets out of the way and lets the R-mode processing handle it instead—which is exactly what you want.
That’s the whole point of Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain. It’s all about using the correct tool for the job.
How did you feel during this exercise? Did it feel “different”? Did you get a sense of losing track of time and being immersed in flow? Did the drawing turn out better than had you tried to just copy it normally?
If not, don’t be discouraged. You may need to try this exercise a few times before it works for you. Once you experience the cognitive shift, you’ll better know what pure R-mode processing feels like, and it will become easier over time.