Jendela Zaman

Left Brain vs. Right: It's a Myth, Research Finds
By Christopher Wanjek | September 3, 2013 12:21pm ET
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The idea that one side of the brain is dominant is a myth, researchers say.
Credit: Human brain image via Shutterstock
It's the foundation of myriad personality assessment tests, self-motivation books and team-building exercises – and it's all bunk.

saw pockets of heavy neural traffic in certain key regions, on average, both sides of the brain were essentially equal in their neural networks and connectivity.

"We just don't see patterns where the whole left-brain network is more connected, or the whole right-brain network is more connected in some people," said Jared Nielsen, a graduate student and first author on the new study.

The myth of people being either "left-brained" or "right-brained" might have arisen from the Nobel Prize-winning research of Roger Sperry, which was done in the 1960s. Sperry studied patients with epilepsy, who were treated with a surgical procedure that cut the brain along a structure called the corpus callosum. Because the corpus callosum connects the two hemispheres of the brain, the left and right sides of these patients' brains could no longer communicate.

Sperry and other researchers, through a series of clever studies, determined which parts, or sides, of the brain were involved in language, math, drawing and other functions in these patients. But then popular-level psychology enthusiasts ran with this idea, creating the notion that personalities and other human attributes are determined by having one side of the brain dominate the other.

The neuroscience community never bought into this notion, Anderson said