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Brain Dominance Myths

by — Last updated: 2014-09-23 in Nervous System Disorders and Diseases

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Are you left or right-brained? Does this have to do with personality? The brain is a very complex organ to study and there are certain beliefs around brain dominance that are actually not true. Here are some examples to explain how brain dominance works.

"Persons that are more logical and better at calculations have a dominant left-hemisphere; persons that are more creative and intuitive, have a dominant right hemisphere" This are the kind of personality descriptions that people believe to be related to brain dominance, but it turns out that this might not be true. These are some of the myths around left and right-sided brain dominance.


Handedness and brain dominance

Being right-handed or left-handed was thought to be matter of right or left hemisphere involvement.

The majority of people is right-handed (about 90%), and the rest is left handed. Ambidextrous are able to use both hands for complex activities, such as writing or throwing a ball.

For years, it was thought that handedness was controlled by the opposite hemisphere to that of the hand you preferred to use. Paul Brocca, the same researcher that discovered the Brocca’s area related to speech, thought that handedness could state the hemisphere that also coordinated or was dominant in language matters. 

In other words, according to Brocca’s idea, if you are a right handed person, the left hemisphere is the dominant one and is also the one that controls language processing; on the other hand, being left-handed means that the right-hemisphere is dominant and therefore controls language processing.

This idea turned out to be not very accurate, because later studies showed that even left-handed people had a left-hemisphere control of language and speech. So, until now, scientists are still doing research on the causes of handedness and their relation to brain lateralization.

Is there a dominant hemisphere then?

No, there is not. You can’t tell which your dominant hemisphere is by taking a personality test. Personality has nothing to do with brain dominance. As already explained, both brain hemispheres specialize in certain tasks, which comes in handy, taking into account that there is a lot of information to be processed by the brain, and in order to be efficient, the information must be gathered and analyzed by expert neurons that can create accurate responses. 

For example, the left hemisphere has also been linked to the processing of math, calculations and logical thinking, besides language; while the right hemisphere seems to be in charge of spatial and musical abilities, visual data processing and face recognition.

However, both sides of the brain work together in the processing of overall data. A study performed by scientists in the University of Utah showed that there is actually no scientific evidence to believe that a person has a stronger left or right –sided brain activity.  

Both hemispheres work at the same extent, because we are all exposed to different stimuli all the time, which requires the use of both brain hemispheres.

See Also: Right And Left Brain Personality Theory Debunked

Being good at Math does not mean that your left hemisphere is better than your right one. They both work together in order to make you the best in Math class; the difference between you and someone else that might not be as good as you depends mainly on how your brain network is organized. But that is a different story.