Theory of Knowledge: International Baccalaureate

Notes on Art and Language and Left and Right Brain Studies

                                                                                  "A picture is worth a thousand words" 

Most art teachers exhort beginning students to "change their way of looking at things," and "to learn how to see."  As children we saw everything in glorious detail. What has stifled us from truly seeing?

In Betty Edwards' breakthrough book Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, she contends that this failure to see and consequently draw is due to a systematic educational suppression of right brain ways of knowing. Our educational system has been based almost solely on the left brain. Why is this?

Language capabilities are located mainly in the left hemisphere. Since language is so closely linked to thinking, reasoning, and the higher mental functions, 19th century scientists named the left hemisphere dominant or major and the right subordinate or minor. Schools and universities have until recently (Gardner's Multiple Intelligences) tended to neglect the nonverbal form of intellect. Teaching is sequenced and linear ; the core subjects are verbal and numerical. American and European histories were studied in separate years as if they were summer and winter clothing. Many students could not tell you that there was a direct relationship between the American and French revolutions or which inspired which.

IB was designed in part to combat this unbalanced way of teaching. Addressing the WHOLE BRAIN, the program uses the right brain as well. TOK specifically asks difficult right brain questions as the hub of knowledge to get away from linear teaching. For example:

Is progress real?, What is truth?, How do all religions interrelate? What can we learn from all of mankind's wars? 

To arrive at the answers to this questions, we rely on the left brain analytical part of our brain, but we must ultimately rely on the right to synthesize that information ( Bloom's Taxonomy).

Whereas the left brain is responsible for

Analyzing, abstracting, counting, marking time, planning , verbalizing, and making rational statements;

The Right Brain is responsible for "seeing" things in an imaginary mode (Can you imagine your pet's face?). We recognize how things exist in space and how parts go together to make a whole. With the right brain, we understand metaphors, we dream, we create new combinations of ideas, we learn that when something is too complex to describe, gestures might work. (Try describing a spiral staircase or how to tie your shoelaces without gesturing or drawing. )

. . . BUT are the left and right brain functions autonomous or separate?

  •  Gabriel Garcia- Marquez's classic novel One Hundred Years of Solitude  traces the history of the world from magic to science and art.  Alchemy, originally a religious attempt to change base metals into gold had as its ultimate end a desire to achieve human immortality.   What was once religious in nature became studied as a scientific pursuit and chemistry was born. 
  • Pythagoras was a mystic.  His highly charged imagination lead him to perceive a harmonious symphony in the universe, each planet possessing its own note on a scale. The Pythagorean theory widely taught today is based on many right-brain intuitive insight.
  • Nostradamus voraciously read left-brain scientific readings to inductively and deductively formulate his projection of future .  
  • Bacon declared that "science is the foundation of the arts and consists of a knowledge of causes, but Art is the whole fruit of science for it applies that knowledge to the production of its efforts." 
  •  Einstein first conceived of his general theory of relativity by imagining himself riding on a light beam. 
  • Lastly, Einstein and Newton are highly regarded left-brain scientists but both spent their last decades searching for the "theory of everything," a decidedly mystic if not religious pursuit.  

   Painting, sculpture, photography, music, and literature are all arts ( and thereby predominately right-brain) but so is the practice of medicine or the "art" of teaching. Scientific knowledge does not by itself make a healer. Many of you can recall a teacher who knew a lot about their subject but didn't know how to communicate. Healing and teaching are arts in that they rely on the "Ah Ha!" intuitive response in the doctor and teacher. Parenting is an art. Those of your parents who read Benjamin Spock's books on how to raise a child ultimately had to throw up their hands and use the "Ah Ha" insight instead. Even logic can be considered an art. In the experimental sciences, the experiment itself is a work of art rooted in intuitive exploration. 

 All the elegant things of life: poems, pictures, fine statues inspire and ennoble. Scientifically we can study the Mona Lisa in terms of applied paints, form, and structure, but that smile is not as easy to define. Art goes beyond science to form the whole.  The left and right brain function together to create something much larger and more complex than either one separately.

Visit  the Mark Tansey link to see how a New York artist  uses language and metaphor in his paintings.  His representational painting frequently fuse left and right brain thinking to challenge perception and broaden our "ways of knowing."