The beagle who lives in the right hemisphere of your brain has an entirely different set of skills than the nerd who lives next door.

The beagle in my brain is named Indy. 

What is the name of the beagle in yours?

Your beagle gives you impulsive intuition and instinctive insight. 

Your beagle gives you romping recklessness, gut feelings and hunches.

Your beagle has a bitterly sharp, piercingly beautiful sense of global pattern recognition which triggers the occasional premonition.

Poindexter is the nerd who lives in the other half of my brain. 

He is forever having to push his glasses back onto his nose.

What is the name of the nerd in yours?

Poindexter uses Google.Indy uses Giggle.

My Poindexter is a friend of Mr. Peabody, the smartest person in the world. Do you remember Mr. Peabody and his adopted son, Sherman, from the Rocky and Bullwinkle show? If not, Indy has a video on page 4 of the rabbit hole that will joggle your memory.

The interesting thing about Sherman and Mr. Peabody is that Jay Ward reversed their roles. It is the human, Sherman, who is naïve about science, and Peabody, the beagle, that is the uptight nerd who leans on cold deductive reasoning.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that. Cold deductive reasoning has its place, but the golden fire of inspiration and the money-green glow of innovation come from that piercingly beautiful sense of pattern recognition that sees the relationships between all the parts.

Your intuitive beagle sees what is and isn’t there. And it sees what could be added or left out to make a thing more elegant and beautiful. 

This fabulous pattern-recognizing beagle lives in the wordless right hemisphere of your brain and it notices more than just visual patterns. It notices patterns of behavior, patterns of history, patterns of music and speech. And it recognizes the shapes of problems and the shapes of their solutions. 

Shapes are merely patterns. This is why jigsaw puzzles are calisthenics for your beagle. The shapes of the pieces and their patterns of color and the position of each piece on the table as you begin is pattern, times pattern, times pattern, times the number of pieces in the box. (Ray Bard, that was for you.)

Your right-brain beagle is the heart and soul of inspiration and innovation, and its only food is play. Reckless, intuitive wandering, that artistic, purposeful wasting of time, that thing you do because you want to, not because you have to. 

Play is what recharges your batteries. 

What, for you, is the highest form of play?

More importantly, how long has it been since you’ve done it?

Go. There you will find your answer.

Roy H. Williams