I hear it every so often. “Are you right-brained or left-brained?”
The notion is that we use the right side of our brains for creative thinking, and the left side is used for analytical thought.
Since I was a little kid, I’ve loved to draw things. It is not one of my best talents. In fact, I’m pretty mediocre. But I’ve always loved to draw. After my first round of college, when I moved back to Dayton and was working quite a bit, I took a few drawing / art classes at Sinclair Community College. In one of those courses, our textbook was “Drawing on the Right-Side of the Brain” by Betty Edwards. I bought full into it.
This right brain / left brain “concept” is widespread in popular psychology. This movement suggests that our individual traits are determined by which half is dominant.
There’s even a small industry devoted to this idea. There are self-help books, personality tests, and even therapies that claim to help you optimize the functions of the stronger half of your brain. These “educational materials” are said to help people get in touch with the weaker half of the brain. Or, perhaps, to make the two halves start working together, for crying out loud.
But here is the thing I’ve learned in the years since. There is no such thing as “left brain vs. right brain” in terms of logic vs. creativity. Or things like emotion vs. analysis. The idea that we are either right-brained or left-brained people is a myth. Although we all obviously have different personalities and talents, there’s no reason to believe these differences can be explained by the dominance of one half of the brain over the other half.
Recent research using brain imaging technology hasn’t found any evidence of right or left dominance.
Things like analytics, creativity, and other higher functions are spread out between both hemispheres.
Like many modern myths, the myth of right-brained and left-brained people is rooted in a bit of real science. We know the right and left sides of the brain actually do specialize in different kinds of tasks, although the real division of labor is much more complex than creativity on the right and logic on the left.
So why has this myth persisted? If there’s no evidence for the myth of right-brained and left-brained people, why do so many people believe it?
One explanation I read (in a scientific journal listed in the Kurzweil Library) suggests that people think our brains would be dominant on one side or the other just as their hands, feet, or eyes are. But that’s not how it works.
Or. It may also have something to do with us humans doing the pigeon-hole sorting. This notion of right-brain / left-brain satisfies our seemingly unlimited appetite for schemes that allow us to sort ourselves (and our friends) into “types” based on our individual characteristics.
Another article (Britannica) went on to say that “most of these (the Myers-Briggs personality test, for example) have about as much scientific validity as horoscopes, but they exploit a psychological phenomenon known as the Barnum Effect (or sometimes the Forer Effect): People like to hear positive things about themselves. The results of these tests and the “insights” they give us are often flattering (and pretty non-specific).
I mean, who wouldn’t love to hear a description of themselves as “spontaneous and intuitive” or “rational and analytical”? The myth is popular, in the end, because it gives us a “scientific” way to talk about ourselves.
So there it is. There I am. All these years, I thought the right side of my brain was super busy. My migraines always happen on the right side of my head. I figured my poor noggin was complaining about being overworked. But as it turns out, my whole brain is firing when it tries to write, draw, or create. Just like it misfires when I try to solve, x = (-b ± √(b² – 4ac)) / (2a).
I don’t even know what that equation means. I hope I didn’t just say something terrible. However, I do not feel any activity anywhere in my brain when I look at that.
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“Think left and think right and think low and think high. Oh, the thinks you can think up if only you try!” – Dr. Seuss
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“Thinking is the hardest work there is, which is probably the reason why so few engage in it.” – Henry Ford
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“The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing.” – Albert Einstein
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Right or Left? Neither, as it turns out.
