“Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain” by Betty Edwards
“Access to Inner Worlds” by Colin Wilson
“To be shaken out of the ruts of ordinary perception, to be shown for a few times hours the outer and inner world, not as they appear to an animal obsessed with words and notions, but as they are apprehended, directly and unconditionally, by MIND AT LARGE — this is an experience of inestimable value to everyone.”
Aldous Huxley “The Doors of Perception
BOTH of these sublime books focus on right brain & left brain functioning. After many readings Mr. Wilson made the whole thing clear. He said that if you’re mainly in left brain, you’re seeing and perceiving in two dimensions. When you’re balanced, right/left brain/ you reach three dimensions.
MS. EDWARDS BOOK is filled with poignant quotations:
“Learning to draw is really a matter of learning to see — to see correctly — and that means a good deal more than merely looking with the eye.” Kimon Nicolaides “The Natural Way to Draw”
“The artist is the confidant of nature. Flowers carry on dialogues with him through the graceful bending of of their stems and the harmoniously tinted nuances of their blossoms. Every flower has a cordial word which nature directs toward him.” AUGUSTE RODIN
“THE MAIN THEME TO EMERGE . . . is that there appears to be two modes of thinking, verbal and nonverbal, represented rather separately in left and right hemispheres, respectively, and that our educational system, as well as science in general, tends to neglect the nonverbal form of intellect. What it comes down to is that modern society discriminates against the right hemisphere.”
Roger W. Sperry. “Lateral Specialization of Cerebral Function in the Surgically Separated Hemispheres”
“The left hemisphere analyzes over time, whereas the right hemisphere synthesizes over space.” Jerre Levy “Psychological implications of bilateral Asymmetry”
“To empty one’s mind of all thought and refill the void with a spirit greater than oneself is to extend the mind into a realm not accessible by conventional processes of reason.”
Edward Hill. “The language of Drawing”
“The painter who strives to represent reality must transcend his own perception . He mut ignore or override the very mechanisms in his mind that create objects out of images. . . . The artist , like the eye, must provide true images and the clues of distance to tell his magic lies. COLIN BLAKEMORE “”Mechanics of the Mind”
COLIN WILSON: “Access to Inner Worlds”
THE LEFT BRAIN IS OBSESSED BY TIME; the right brain seems have little sense of time.
The left brain tends to hurry forward, its eyes fixed on the future, while the right strolls along with its hands in its pockets, enjoying the scenery.
One of the main functions of the right brain is to add a dimension of reality to out experience. The world as seen by left-brain consciousness is flat, a two-dimensional, little more than a sketch. The business of the right brain is to add a third dimension, It is this recognition of reality that brings the feeling of relief, the sense that ‘all is well.’ As absurd as it sounds , we live most of our lives upon the assumption that reality is unreal–two dimensional. We feel that it is flat, boring, two easily known. but when the right brain begins to do its proper work, we recognize the absurdity of this assumption: that the world is infinitely richer and more meaningful than the left can grasp.
I would heavily recommend both of these great books to anyone looking for insights into the working of the left brain/ right brain functioning. I love both authors and they get to the crux of the mind.
THREE CHEERS FOR MS. EDWARDS AND MR. WILSON