Which side are you on?
Why the “left-brain/right-brain” myth needs to go
By Emma Smisek
Flawed ideas and beliefs are heavily influenced by an attraction to simplicity. When everything is good or bad, black or white, right or left, life becomes easier to understand. Simplicity is especially enticing when trying to understand people. Personalities are messy and complicated, which is why it’s easy to accept theories that classify people as either one type or the other.
There is a popular ideology in psychology that people are either “right-brained” or “left-brained,” and that this determines personality and thinking styles. The idea is that some people have more activity on one side of their brain than in the other. Right-brained individuals are said to have more creativity, emotional intelligence, intuition, and imagination, while left-brained individuals are said to be more logical, orderly, objective, and skilled with analytical thinking and working with numbers.
The locations of different cognitive functions in the brain do matter, but lateralization (the specialization of certain mental processes to either the right or left hemispheres) of these functions appears to be local rather than global. That is, the hemispheres themselves don’t function as dichotomous entities as the right-brain/left-brain idea asserts. This was shown in a 2013 study from the University of Utah that analyzed resting brain scans of 1,011 subjects. Researchers measured thousands of neural connections and found that some brain functions like language and attention were localized in the left and right hemispheres, respectively, but found no evidence that having greater activity in one hemisphere determines personality traits. Individual personalities aren’t “right or left.”
Whether or not people take this myth literally, however, isn’t as problematic as the metaphor it represents, which can be divisive and promote feelings of superiority.
For example: in one of my art classes in high school, my teacher began an activity by showing us slides of paintings created by previous students. One of these was an intricate picture of a human brain, portraying the hemispheres in contrasting styles. The right half was bursting with imaginative patterns and colors. The left half was gray and had minimal detailing of computer science-type images. As she explained the difference between the two sides, she implied that one was inherently “better” than the other.
The right-brain/left-brain myth discourages us from trying to see the whole person. Simplicity is alluring, but humans are complex; our personalities are integrations of seemingly contradictory traits. Our hemispheric designations are meaningless.
What about the common overlap of musical and mathematical ability? What about the scientist whose vivid imagination allows them to create great innovations? Or the strategic, detail-oriented thinker with great artistic skills? Or the analytical, rational thinker with high empathy who often experiences overwhelming emotions but hides them?
The acceptance of this pervasive metaphor is the acceptance of being pigeonholed. It’s unlikely that most people take their right-left designation very seriously, but there is still an unconscious, collective agreement that this is how we should understand people, that we should refuse to bother with complexity. This agreement can only be undone when we are willing to look beyond left and right.