Rachel: Alright, Justine, I'm going to say the title of a book, and I want your honest, one-liner reaction. Ready? Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain. Justine: Sounds like a self-help book for people who are bad at Pictionary. Or maybe a guide for ambidextrous people who've run out of hobbies. Rachel: Close! It’s actually one of the most influential art instruction books ever written, with over three million copies sold. We're talking about The New Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain by Dr. Betty Edwards. Justine: Hold on, Doctor Betty Edwards? I was picturing a bohemian artist in a paint-splattered smock, not someone with a doctorate. Rachel: And that’s the key to the whole thing. Edwards wasn't just an artist; she earned her doctorate in Art, Education, and Psychology from UCLA. She developed these revolutionary ideas while trying to solve a very real problem she saw as a high school teacher: why her brilliant students, who could master complex subjects like chemistry, would get so frustrated they’d sometimes cry when asked to draw a simple portrait. Justine: Okay, so a psychologist trying to solve a drawing problem. That already sounds more interesting. Where does she even start with a mystery like that? It feels like some people are just born with "the talent" and others aren't. Rachel: That's the exact assumption she wanted to dismantle. She proposed that drawing isn't a magical talent residing in your hands. It's a cognitive skill. More specifically, it's a seeing skill, and the block most of us have is located squarely between our ears.

Justine: Between our ears? So you're saying my inability to draw a convincing-looking dog is a thinking problem? I feel slightly offended, but also intrigued. Rachel: It's a thinking problem for almost everyone! Edwards’ big idea, which was groundbreaking in the late 70s, was to apply the brain hemisphere research of Nobel laureate Roger Sperry to art. She created this framework of two modes of thinking: L-mode and R-mode. Justine: Ah, the classic left-brain, right-brain theory. The logical, analytical left brain and the creative, intuitive right brain. Rachel: Exactly. L-mode, or Left-mode, is your verbal, analytical brain. It thinks sequentially, it loves logic, and most importantly, it names everything. When it sees a chair, it doesn't see a collection of lines, angles, and shapes; it accesses the symbol for "chair" that it has stored since childhood. It's fast, efficient, and great for navigating the world. Justine: It’s like my brain's internal narrator, or its own version of autocorrect, constantly labeling everything and simplifying it into a known category. My brain sees a face and immediately goes, "Okay, two eyes, a nose, a mouth." It pulls up the file for 'face.' Rachel: Precisely. And that's a huge problem for drawing, because a real face isn't a generic symbol. It's a unique landscape of complex curves, shadows, and proportions. Then you have R-mode, the Right-mode. This is the non-verbal, visual, and holistic way of thinking. It doesn't deal in words or symbols. It sees patterns, spatial relationships, and how parts fit together into a whole. It's the silent cinematographer to L-mode's chatty narrator. Justine: Okay, that makes sense as a concept. But how does this conflict actually play out? How does the 'narrator' brain mess things up? Rachel: Edwards has a brilliant exercise to make you feel this conflict directly. It’s based on the classic optical illusion drawing called "Vase/Faces." You know the one, where you can either see a vase or two human profiles looking at each other. Justine: Oh yeah, I know that one. It kind of flickers back and forth in your mind. Rachel: Right. So, the exercise is to draw one of the profiles. Let's say you start at the top. Your L-mode kicks in and starts naming the parts as you draw: "forehead... nose... upper lip... chin." It's easy enough. But then, you have to draw the other profile to complete the vase. And this is where the magic happens. As you try to draw the second profile as a mirror image, your L-mode gets hopelessly confused. Justine: Why? Rachel: Because you're trying to do two things at once. You're trying to draw the contour of a vase, which is an R-mode spatial task, but your L-mode is screaming, "No, you're drawing a nose! And that's not what a nose looks like!" People report feeling a literal mental "crunch" or paralysis. Their pencil hovers over the paper because the two brain modes are at war. The verbal system is interfering with the visual system. Justine: Wow. So the only way to finish the drawing is to get the L-mode to shut up. You have to stop thinking "face" and start seeing the shape of the line itself. Rachel: You've got it. You have to trick your brain into a different mode of processing. But this brings up a point I know you're going to ask. Justine: I was just about to. This whole left-brain/right-brain thing feels very... 1980s pop psychology. Hasn't modern neuroscience shown that this is a huge oversimplification? That the brain is much more interconnected? Is this whole book based on pseudoscience? Rachel: That is the central and most valid criticism of the book today. Modern neuroscience confirms the brain is not so neatly divided. Creativity and logic aren't siloed in different hemispheres. However, it's important to see Edwards' work in its historical context. She was using the most current, Nobel Prize-winning research of her time to create a powerful metaphor for a phenomenon that is undeniably real. Justine: So the labels might be outdated, but the experience she's describing—that mental conflict—is real. Rachel: Exactly. The goal isn't to literally shut down half your brain. The genius of her method is in designing tasks that the verbal, symbol-loving L-mode will look at, find confusing or nonsensical, and essentially reject. When the dominant L-mode gives up, the subdominant R-mode gets a chance to take the lead. The theory is a map, maybe an old one, but it still points to a real treasure.

Justine: Okay, I can get on board with that. It's a functional metaphor. So what do these L-mode-rejecting tasks look like? Rachel: This leads us to her most famous, and frankly, weirdest exercise. It's the one that was a pivotal moment in her own research. She was teaching at a high school in the 60s, and on a whim, she asked her students to copy a line drawing by Picasso—his portrait of Igor Stravinsky. But she had them do it upside down. Justine: Upside down? Why? That sounds harder. Rachel: That's what you'd think! But the results were astonishing. The students, who had been struggling to draw basic objects, produced these incredibly accurate, sophisticated copies of the Picasso. When she asked them how they did it, they all said the same thing, and this is a key quote from the book: "Upside down, we didn't know what we were drawing." Justine: Whoa. That's it, isn't it? Their L-mode, their internal critic, just gave up. It couldn't look at an inverted line and say, "That's a nose, and that's not how a nose should look." It didn't recognize a nose. It just saw a line that curved this way and connected to another line that angled that way. Rachel: You've nailed it. By turning the image upside down, she turned a symbolic problem into a purely perceptual one. The L-mode couldn't attach its pre-packaged labels, so it bowed out, and the R-mode was free to do what it does best: see spatial relationships accurately. The students were amazed at their own drawings. They had the skill all along; their own brain was just getting in the way. Justine: That is such a profound insight. It's like the ultimate life hack for getting out of your own head. So, what are the other tricks? Is it all just drawing things upside down? Rachel: The other major technique is learning to see and draw negative space. This is another one that feels completely counter-intuitive at first. Let's say you have to draw a chair. Justine: My L-mode brain is already picturing a square seat, four stick legs, a rectangular back. The classic chair symbol. Rachel: Right. And if you try to draw that, you'll likely end up with a stiff, generic-looking drawing. Edwards' approach is to tell you: don't draw the chair. Instead, I want you to draw the shape of the empty space between the chair legs. Draw the shape of the air framed by the back of the chair. Justine: You're asking me to draw... nothing? Rachel: You're drawing a shape! It's just a shape you don't have a name for. Your L-mode doesn't have a stored symbol for "that weird trapezoid of floor visible under the chair." Because it can't name it, it can't interfere. You're forced to just see the shape for what it is—its angles, its curves. And when you accurately draw all the "nothing" shapes around the chair, a perfectly proportioned chair magically appears on your paper. Justine: That's brilliant. It's like solving a puzzle by looking at the missing pieces instead of the pieces themselves. So this is a core skill for an artist? Seeing the space around things? Rachel: It's one of the five basic perceptual skills she identifies. The first is the perception of edges, which is what the upside-down drawing and contour drawing exercises train. The second is the perception of spaces—that's negative space. The third is the perception of relationships, which is about proportion and perspective, or sighting. The fourth is lights and shadows, and the fifth is the perception of the gestalt—the whole, the "thingness" of the thing you're drawing. Justine: And all of these are designed to bypass that L-mode critic. It feels like the book is less an art manual and more a guide to applied mindfulness. It's about learning to be present with what you are actually seeing, not what you think you're seeing. Rachel: That's a perfect way to put it. Artists who are deep in their work often describe an altered state of consciousness. Time seems to disappear, they're not aware of their surroundings, and their internal monologue goes quiet. That's the R-mode state. The book is a practical guide to entering that state at will.

Justine: So when you put it all together, the big takeaway isn't just "here's how to draw a face." It's a fundamental re-framing of what creativity is. The book argues that this ability to see clearly is not some rare gift. It's a latent skill in all of us, just buried under years of symbolic, verbal conditioning. Rachel: Exactly. And that’s why her work has had such a massive impact beyond the art world. These techniques have been used in corporate training seminars for companies like Disney, Apple, and IBM. They're not trying to turn their engineers into painters; they're teaching them a new way to solve problems. Justine: I can see that. It's about learning to look at a problem and, instead of jumping to the obvious, named components, you learn to see the "negative space" around it—the unasked questions, the hidden relationships, the things you don't have a name for yet. Rachel: That's the deeper wisdom. Edwards is teaching a method for accessing a different kind of intelligence. The artist Robert Henri had a quote she uses: "The object... is the attainment of a state of being, a state of high functioning... The picture is but a by-product of the state, a trace, the footprint of the state." The beautiful drawing you create is just the evidence that you successfully entered that more perceptive, more present state of mind. Justine: Wow. The drawing is just the footprint. That's a powerful idea. It makes you realize that the process is the entire point. It’s not about the finished product, but about the shift in consciousness you achieve along the way. Rachel: And that shift is accessible to anyone willing to look at the world a little differently. Or maybe just turn it upside down for a while. Justine: It really makes you wonder what else we could achieve if we learned to deliberately quiet our internal narrator more often. What problems could we solve if we just took the time to look at the 'negative space' around them? Rachel: A question worth drawing out. Justine: This is Aibrary, signing off.