The Two Hemispheres of My Brain
Ever since I was a kid, I’ve always had this need to do both a very analytically intense activity and a very creatively intense activity at exactly the same time. The more intense the analytical activity, the more intense the urge to do something creative at the same time.
When I was a teenager it was writing code or building a DAC for my Apple IIe while also teaching myself to compose music on piano. During college, it was all of my academic work for my Biomedical Engineering degree, but then I also took poetry writing and computer music composition classes at the same time. Near the end of undergrad, when I was doing my senior project on stereotactic neurosurgery, I was also writing/directing a one act play. And post-college, the poetry and music combined to writing songs and producing albums, while I was starting my company Keyhole (which later got bought by Google and became Google Earth).
I don’t think I did this for any sense of achievement, but somehow my brain was just wired that way. If one side of my brain got highly stimulated, I was compelled to stimulate the other side to the same intensity at the same time. I somewhat rationalized it to myself with the whole right brain vs left brain split though I never came up with any real theories as to why it happens.
Today, it is creative writing on Medium, whether it be about technology or movies or other topics that come to mind, and for the analytical side of things it is building prototypes of new ideas for a company, the latest of which is Chikai 🤖 (which you can check out here http://chikai.co). I wrote a bunch of code this morning to add some features to Chikai 🤖 and now this afternoon, I got inspired to write some posts on Medium, which is why I’m writing this post now as well as another one I just wrote about the actor Nicholas Hoult.
It’s an odd compulsion and it would be easier if it would happen one at a time, but for whatever reason they are tightly interwoven and they want to happen at the same time with the same intensity. I’m sure there is some psychological explanation for this phenomenon and I’d be interested to hear if others have the same compulsion, but for the moment please excuse me while I get back to writing code. 😉
