Art or Science?

We often hear the expression ‘Head or Heart’, but what does it mean?

According to popular metaphors, the head and the heart respectively embody important features of one’s personality. People think of the head or brain as embodying one’s reason, intellect, and factually based approach, while the heart is the seat of one’s emotions as well as caring and compassion. Furthermore, many people identify more strongly with either their head or their heart. They may feel that they are caring and supportive, others may see themselves as logical and considered.

So, is it important to know which you are? People who identify with their head tend to be more intellectual and knowledgeable yet inter-personally cold, while those who identify with their heart are more emotionally expressive, caring, and interpersonally warm.

This would suggest that knowing which type you are would increase your awareness of how others perceive you. So does this support the theory that people may see more agreeable personality traits in those who are slightly less intelligent? If so, does that mean that having a higher level of intelligence is not always an advantage? If you do want to find out your ‘leaning’, there are numerous on-line tests, but please don’t take them too seriously, I’d hate for you to lose friends over this!

Another similar dichotomy is left brain vs right brain.

Are you right-brained or left-brained?

It's a popular question, hovering at the edges of sound neuroscience. The left brain is supposed to be more creative and artistic, the right brain more logical and scientific. At school we were encouraged to either take a scientific/maths route or an arts/humanities direction.

So is it that easy? Are we either one or the other? No, not according to science! In a sweeping two-year study, published in 2013 in the journal PLOS One, researchers looked at the brains of more than 1,000 people and found no evidence for significant differences in brain-side dominance among individuals.

Head or Heart, Left-brained or Right -brained? I don’t know about you but my brain is spinning! So let’s test it out? Could the same brain belong to an engineer who invented things are varied as flying machines, weapons of war and Scuba diving; also belong to an artist who painted the most famous painting in the world? Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci suggests that the artist and the scientist can live together in perfect harmony (thank you Paul McCartney).

At the agency we also believe that art and science can be combined. It is this alchemy that creates the world class CGI images and films that my agency was are renowned for.

by Richard Wright