Does Art Make You, well.... Smart?

Ever wish you could sleep with a 1500-page tome under your pillow and with the power not unlike osmosis, awake refreshed and a whole lot smarter than when you went to sleep the night before?  I do. And the first book I would place under my pillow would be Dr. Iain McGilchrist’s The Matter with Things.

I need to know everything that man has ever written and enjoy listening to his podcast episodes, interviews, and lectures. In fact, I wish everyone would pay attention to this man’s ideas on the importance of developing both hemispheres of the brain for a healthy brain, community, and culture.

Recently I was driving my sweet father back to his apartment at a local assisted living community near my home, and we passed the neighborhood elementary school. On the marquee near the road was a special message announcing, “STEAM Program Dec 3.”

“Steam? What’s a Steam Program?” he asked.

“You know?” I responded, “Science, Technology, all that?”

“No, that’s STEM, not STEAM.”

“Actually, Dad, It’s STEAM. They added Art.”

Imagine a big scowl, as only an old Jones man can do, especially one who was a math major and career engineer for Bell South. “Why would they do that? Art’s not important!”

“I beg your pardon,” I shot back. “A healthy brain is a fully exercised brain. And what better way to stimulate the right hemisphere than with art, whether it be painting, music, theatre?” I knew this hit a chord with him. Dad was voted “Most Likely to Succeed” in high school, was ranked third in his class, as well as having played in the high school marching band for eight years. Yes, you read that correctly, eight. He started playing alto saxophone in the high school marching band when he was in the fourth grade, culminating in performing a solo at his graduation, but has never picked up the instrument since.

Dad at 17, a senior at Milan High

Whether he values it or not, Dad exercised both hemispheres of his brain… calculus and alto sax, chemistry and piano, on-air personality at the local radio station before school and on weekends, piloting a small plane before the age of 16 and later piloting gliders, licensed HAM Radio operator, as well as earning Eagle Scout.

Milan High School March Band 1958

And this is why I find McGilchrist’s work so important, as an artist and an educator. McGilchrist argues in the book I have yet to read or sleep on, for that matter, that reality is not best understood through the left hemisphere’s preference for abstraction, control, decontextualized parts, and explicit, utilitarian thinking, but through the right hemisphere’s holistic, implicit, relational, and paradoxical grasp of context, flow, individuality, and the sacred.

From the book’s synopsis, I’ve gleaned his central thesis is this… the modern world suffers from a pathological “left-hemisphere capture.” Institutions, technology, science, bureaucracy, and even much of philosophy have become disconnected from lived experience, embodiment, beauty, meaning, and the implicit. The result is a civilization that is increasingly efficient yet hollow, controlling yet fragile, certain yet deluded.

The book ends with a guarded hope that recognizes this imbalance can help us restore a right-hemisphere-guided balance: re-enchanting the world, recovering meaning, and remembering that reality is deeper, richer, and more mysterious than our current paradigm admits.

In short: “The matter with things is that we have handed the steering wheel to the wrong half of the brain.”

Out of curiosity, I researched famous scientists, engineers, doctors, all the “left-brained” professions I could think of and whether they also enjoyed right-brained pursuits. I hope you enjoy the list. I also hope you join me in my crusade to educate the world on the necessity to re-balance, as Dr. McGilchrist puts it, and restore right-hemisphere-guided activities to our schools and our lives. Who wouldn’t want to be re-enchanted with the world? With beauty? With wonder and meaning?

Here’s a fascinating list of people from strongly analytical, left-brained professions (science, mathematics, engineering, medicine, invention, etc.) who were also accomplished in the arts — especially painting, music composition, poetry, or literature. Many of them were not just dabblers; some reached professional or near-professional level in their artistic pursuits.

Name	Primary “Left-Brained” Profession	Artistic Pursuit(s)
Leonardo da Vinci	Engineer, anatomist, inventor, scientist	One of the greatest painters and draftsmen of all time (Mona Lisa, Last Supper)
Michelangelo	Sculptor, architect, engineer, anatomist	Painter (Sistine Chapel ceiling), poet
Alexander Borodin	Organic chemist (co-discoverer of aldol reaction)	Major Romantic composer (Prince Igor, symphonies, string quartets)
Brian May	Astrophysicist (PhD in astrophysics)	Lead guitarist and songwriter for Queen
Albert Einstein	Theoretical physicist	Accomplished violinist (played Bach, Mozart; music was central to his life)
Richard Feynman	Theoretical physicist, Nobel Prize 1965	Bongo player, amateur painter, sketch artist (sold drawings under pseudonym)
Santiago Ramón y Cajal	Neuroscientist, Nobel Prize in Medicine 1906	Excellent draftsman and painter (beautiful scientific illustrations + landscapes)
Charles Darwin	Naturalist, biologist	Serious watercolorist and sketch artist
Samuel Morse	Inventor of the telegraph and Morse code	Prominent academic painter (founded National Academy of Design)
Brian Cox	Particle physicist (worked on ATLAS at CERN)	Keyboard player in 1990s pop bands D:Ream and Dare
Dexter Holland	Molecular biologist (PhD candidate, HIV research)	Lead singer and songwriter of The Offspring
Tom Scholz	MIT-trained mechanical engineer	Musician, inventor of Rockman amplifiers, leader of the band Boston
Greg Graffin	Evolutionary biologist, paleontologist (PhD UCLA)	Lead singer and lyricist of punk band Bad Religion
Milo Aukerman	Plant biologist (PhD in biochemistry)	Lead singer of the Descendents (punk band)
Jean Albert Gaudry	Paleontologist	Published poet and playwright
Frederick Banting	Physician, co-discoverer of insulin, Nobel 1923	Sunday painter (friend of Group of Seven, exhibited landscapes)
William Herschel	Astronomer (discovered Uranus)	Composer of 24 symphonies, numerous concertos and church music
Johann Lamont	Mathematician (Lambert’s cosine law, map projection)	Painter and engraver
Maria Gaetana Agnesi	Mathematician (wrote first integral calculus book)	Wrote sacred music and was an accomplished harpsichordist
Werner Heisenberg	Quantum physicist, Nobel Prize 1932	Classical pianist (played Beethoven, Schubert at concert level)
Max Planck	Theoretical physicist, Nobel Prize 1918	Skilled pianist and composer (wrote art songs and an operetta)
Erwin Schrödinger	Quantum physicist, Nobel Prize 1933	Published poet and amateur sculptor
Alan Turing	Mathematician, computer scientist, cryptanalyst	Drew and painted; wrote poetry
Claude Shannon	Mathematician, father of information theory	Juggling unicyclist, built juggling machines, played clarinet and piano
Hedy Lamarr	co-inventor of frequency-hopping (basis of Wi-Fi, GPS, Bluetooth)	Actress and Hollywood star
Robert Fulton	Engineer (first commercial steamboat)	Professional painter (studied under Benjamin West in London)
Ada Lovelace	Mathematics / Considered the world’s first computer programmer (analytical engine algorithms).	Published poetry; wrote highly imaginative, almost mystical prose about the poetic possibilities of mathematics and computing.
Marie Curie	Physics & chemistry (two Nobel Prizes, discovery of radium & polonium).	Accomplished amateur painter (still lifes and portraits); kept illustrated notebooks that blend scientific precision with aesthetic sensibility.
Grace Hopper	Pioneering computer scientist, Rear Admiral, key developer of COBOL.	Wrote poetry throughout her life; one of her best-known poems, “The Ship of the Line,” reflects on naval and computational command.
Rita Levi-Montalcini	Neurobiologist (Nobel Prize 1986 for discovering nerve growth factor).	Published a book of poetic aphorisms and reflections (In Praise of Imperfection) and was an accomplished amateur painter.
Barbara McClintock	Cytogeneticist (Nobel Prize 1983 for discovering genetic transposition).	Played classical violin and had a deeply aesthetic, almost mystical appreciation for patterns in nature that she described in poetic terms.
Gerty Cori	Biochemist (Nobel Prize 1947, first woman to win in Physiology/Medicine, Cori cycle).	Wrote poetry in Czech and German; her notebooks contain verses interspersed with metabolic pathway diagrams.
Mae Jemison	Astronaut, physician, chemical engineer (first Black woman in space).	Professional-level modern dancer (danced with the Alvin Ailey company before NASA); published poetry and speaks of science as an artistic endeavor.
Lisa Tauxe	Leading paleomagnetist and geophysicist	Award-winning watercolor painter whose scientific illustrations have been exhibited
Hertha Ayrton	Engineer & physicist (pioneering work on electric arcs and ripple formation; first woman to read a paper before the Royal Society).	Published poetry and was an accomplished painter.

Notable patterns

• Music (especially classical violin, piano, or composition) is by far the most common artistic outlet among physicists and mathematicians.

• Physicians and biologists often gravitate toward visual arts (drawing, painting) — probably because they already draw a lot for their work.

These polymaths show that deep analytical ability and deep artistic creativity are not mutually exclusive — using both hemispheres of the brain their work shows insight to philosophy, science, reason, intuition, metaphysics, time, space, consciousness, matter, and the nature of God and reality itself.