There is no question that the right brain is involved in creative thinking. But the idea that creativity is solely a function of one side of the brain is far too simplistic.

The myth that it’s all about the right, well just isn’t right. As outlined in a recent article, any creative act, from solving a puzzle to painting a masterpiece, requires the input and integration of information from both sides of your brain. And research is increasingly demonstrating that creativity really is a whole-brain process.

If you measure the electrical activity generated by the brain during creative tasks, there is clear evidence of interaction between distant regions in both the left and right brain.

So as you might expect, if you’re highly creative you have more interaction between the left and right brain than less creative folks. Engaging both sides of the brain allows you to generate more creative solutions.

The good news is that even if you don’t consider yourself particularly creative, training can increase your creativity by improving communication between the two sides of your brain.

Thus professional musicians have more efficient interaction between the left and right brain than people employed in less creative pursuits, and people with design training show greater interaction than novices. By increasing interaction between the two sides of the brain, you increase creativity.

Creativity is not just a right brain process. Your right brain is vital to creativity, but so is the left: it is the interaction between the two sides of the brain, and the integration of different concepts and disparate processes, that fosters creative thinking.

When it comes to creativity, two hemispheres really are better than one.

Plenty of people’s Twitter feeds appear to be connected directly to their egos, but one scientist’s is actually wired to his brain. In April, University of Wisconsin doctoral student Adam Wilson — working with adviser Justin Williams, above — tweeted 23 characters just by thinking. He focused his attention on one flashing letter after another on a computer screen while wearing a cap outfitted with electrodes that monitored changes in his brain activity to figure out which character he wanted. His efforts spelled out “USING EEG TO SEND TWEET,” among other messages. The feat marks a major step forward in establishing communication for people with “locked in” syndrome, which paralyzes the body, except for the eyes, but leaves the mind alert. For now, though, it’s slow going: with the speediest brain tweeters reportedly managing just eight characters a minute, it’s a good thing they’re limited to 140.

From Time magazine.

April, the world was introduced to Ruppy, the first known fluorescent dog. In natural light, Ruppy seems to be an almost-normal beagle — though his paws look as if he has stepped in pink ink. Under ultraviolet light, the effect is quite evident: he emits an eerie red glow.

Ruppy is the first transgenic puppy, which means that he has genes taken from another species. His red fluorescent luminosity comes from the gene of a sea anemone: the gene was introduced into a dog’s skin cell; the nucleus was then cloned and transferred to another dog’s egg cell, which was then fertilized and eventually became Ruppy. In what is perhaps a stab at genetic humor, his name is also a hybrid, having been formed by combining “Ruby” and “Puppy.”

Scientists performed the experiment to demonstrate the feasibility of cross-species implants of genes that control for a specific trait (in this case, fluorescence). The hope is that transgenic dogs can now be created to acquire specific human diseases, which will make them valuable biomedical research subjects. Transgenic mice are already in widespread use, but because rodents are so different from humans, they can be difficult to conduct tests on.

For dairy farmers, whether to name their cows may seem like a matter of taste. But it might not be. It could be a business decision. A study of several hundred British dairies published in the journal Anthrozoös in March compared responses to a survey about cow treatment with independently collected milk data and found that cows that have names make, in a given year, about 258 liters more milk per farm than anonymous ones — a bump of about 6 percent.