The right brain and the left brain control different parts of your experience. Most of us spend most of our time using our left brain – that’s the one that deals with logic, symbols, reading, talking, math, schedules, planning, thinking verbally. The left brain deals with things logically and thinks in specifics. Most of the tasks we do throughout the day are likely to be left-brain activities. The right brain, on the other hand, is the part that deals with intuition, creativity, spatial relationships, music, and looking at things as a whole. Most importantly for our purposes, it deals with drawing and sketching – especially drawing and sketching realistically. When I was younger, before I learned about this stuff, I mainly used my left brain to draw. Most people do this – let their left brains take over when they draw things. When your left brain draws a face, it looks like a smiley face. Your left brain turns the face into a symbol it can understand. Likewise trees often look like brown rectangles with a green fuzzy circle at the top, birds are little m’s. You get the idea. So when a person who’s primarially a left-brainer is asked to draw from life – “Draw your hand” or “draw that person over there”, they will have a very hard time with it. Probably they’ll draw the hand as a blob with five sausages protruding from it, because that’s what the left brain “sees” when it sees a hand. It knows a hand has fingers and fingers are pretty much spherical. So it simplifies the patterns. What learning to sketch will do for you is to open up and exercise your right brain – because when you look at something and really “see” it – see that the tree is actually grey, see the actual shapes of eyes and fingers and faces, when you see past the symbols, you’re exercising an important part of your mind – and you’ll find this gives you extra brainpower and helps you in many aspects of your life. Plus it’s cool to be able to actually see everything as it is rather than as your left brain interprets it!