Sassy Mythbusting: Left Brain Logical vs Right Brain Creative
Welcome to the Behavioural Sassonomics series where we bust pop psychology myths! This new segment is intended to be fun, educational, and will surely make you look smart in front of your friends. Today: On how Left Brain vs Right Brain is NOT A THING.
Have you ever heard someone say that they are, or someone else is, either a left brain person or a right brain person?
The pop psychology theory goes something like this: If you’re more analytical in your thinking, you are said to be left brained. If you are predominantly more creative, you’re said to be right brained. And everyone has a dominant type.
The myth:
Where did this load of hooey even come from? Psychobiologist Robert W Sperry proposed that our two hemispheres functioned differently back in the 1960s (he won a Nobel prize for this in 1981). His research is actually pretty fascinating and kind of gross. He started by splitting the two hemispheres in the brains of monkeys and cats (etc.), and then moved on to splitting human brains as a treatment for epilepsy, and in doing so showed that sides (read: parts) of the brain have different functions. He noticed that splitting the brain so that the two sides couldn’t send messages to each other didn’t really impede human functioning, but information coming in to the right eye and information coming into the left eye were processed differently.
If you’re interested, here is a pretty sweet video where they interviewed someone from Sperry’s lab:
BUSTED!
Oh Dr Sperry, you got it so wrong! Since then, we’ve learned so much more about the brain. More advanced research methods (ex. fMRI – not severing parts of people’s brains!) have not only proven that there is no evidence for left brain vs right brain people, but that the brain definitely doesn’t function like two distinct halves and you never use just one side of your brain at a time.
In fact, the brain is actually a super connected network. Creativity, previously credited to the right brain, has been shown to involve many different regions of the brain simultaneously. Neuroscience is discovering amazing things about the brain at an astounding pace, showing how different regions of the brain specialize in different functions, but are hyperconnected and function like a network.
https://blog.mymsaa.org/tag/brain-function/
WHY WE NEED TO STOP THE MYTH
This myth was not hard to prove wrong through research, but why is it so hard to eliminate from popular belief? (For example, 91% of school teachers in the UK believe it to be true).
It might have something to do with how this myth perpetuates gendered stereotypes.
Isn’t it interesting that many men are labelled as left brain logical and women as right brain creative? Or perhaps I should say women aren’t associated with left brain logical and default to right brain. Researchers have pointed out that the split-brain hypothesis is more about gender prejudices than it is about brain functioning.
“This significant discovery quickly captured the public mind, because it was thought to validate pre-existing prejudices at the time: that white men were more intellectually evolved than women, people of colour, children, and the poor.”
This is called Neurosexism
Intellectual ability became associated with the left hemisphere and men, and anything that wasn’t an intellectualized skill – anything associated with animalistic instinct like emotion - defaulted to the right brain and was as a result allocated to being inferior. The myth of the gendered brain is highly pervasive: generally speaking most people "know"that men are more left-brained and women are more right-brained.
This is known as neurosexism. The idea that one’s brain is inferior because of their gender. However, a wide amount of neuroscience research has identified no decisive, category-defining differences between the brains of men and women. But this common belief has real-world consequences such as women being discouraged from pursuing STEM careers. For example, in 1970, women made up only 8% of all STEM jobs (despite representing 38% of the workforce). In 2019, that portion has increased to 27% of STEM and 48% of the overall workforce adding further proof to how women’s brains are simply just not “wired differently” (p.s. the women who do work in STEM still earn way less than male counterparts).
So not only is the left brain vs right brain thing false (and therefore you should stop using it immediately so you don’t have someone say ah actually that’s not true and feel embarrassed) but it can perpetuate gender prejudices that simply have no backing in scientific research.
Split-brain? NOT A THING!
With love from my full brain,
