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DEVELOPING NEW BUSINESS IDEAS40

debunking the myth of the ‘creatives’ Prior to Sperry,

popular thinking had it that only dominant right-brain thinkers, the
‘artistic types’ and ‘creatives’, could be creative. Sperry’s work
demonstrated that everybody can tap into their right-brain and
overcome the conventional preference for left-brain thinking which age
and the education system conspire to create. Later sections of this book
will show you how.

There are strong precedents for Sperry’s depiction of creativity as
requiring the use and co-ordination of both sides of the brain. This
combination facilitates the analysis by the left-brain of the flashes of
insight and intuition from the right-brain. It is claimed that Einstein
was lying on a hillside one summer’s day, contemplating the light rays
shining into his half-closed eyes. Dreaming of how it might feel to
travel down a light beam, he experienced the sudden right-brain
intuition of what it would be like. Only later did the Theory of
Relativity find left-brain elaboration and expression in words and
mathematical symbols.

The precise chemistry of carbon compounds owes a large part to 19th-
century German chemist Friedrich August Kekulé. By a strange set of
circumstances, Kekulé was a witness at a murder trial where the
victim’s distinctive ring formed a crucial part of the evidence. The ring
featured the old alchemy seal of two intertwined serpents biting each
other’s tails. Many years later, while agonising over the structure of
benzene which logic alone seemed unable to resolve, Kekulé fell asleep
in front of the fire. He dreamt of the twining serpents on the old ring,
whirling in the flames. Finally the serpents caught each other’s tails and
formed a circle. The visual imagery generated by turning his dreams
loose on a seemingly intractable problem and by breaking the thread of
logic had produced a sudden intuitive insight, namely that benzene was
formed of a hexagonal ring. As he wrote in his diary: ‘As if by a flash of
lightning I awoke; and . . . spent the rest of the night in working out the
consequences of the hypothesis.’

‘as if by a flash of lightning I awoke; and
spent the rest of the night in working out
the consequences of the hypothesis’