Asked by: Liz Dennis, London
No. At least, not in the popular sense that creative people are more ‘right-brained’ than logical or analytical people are: a study that scanned the brains of over 1,000 people found no such differences.
It is true that different brain areas are specialised for different tasks, including vision, hearing, touch and the control of movements. And the main language areas are in the left hemisphere in 95 per cent of right-handers. But both hemispheres work together in almost everything we do, and creativity is a whole-brain process. Painters and sculptors may draw on mathematical and logical ideas as well as visual imagery and words, just as scientists inventing a new theory may do the reverse.
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