Brain Myths: Part 3 - Left Brained/Right Brained

I went to school through the 80s and 90s. Then I started teaching at the turn of the century (1998) and continued until 2024. I tell you this so that you will understand how many fads I have seen in education. As sure as the return of bell-bottom jeans as "flared-leg," some of those educations fades have faded and then returned under new names. Fashion has to have fads, or the fashion industry would die as we all just held onto our clothes until they wore out. Education doesn't have to be that way. The education curriculum and product industry needs it to be that way, but actual teaching doesn't. We can find out what works - there's tons of research available - and do those things.

Some of the things that prevent us from doing that are out of our control. We can't prevent administrative initiatives. But there is one that is in our control - our own wrong beliefs. Teachers often hold myths about the brain that prevent them from doing what works. I'm not judging them. Many of these myths were taught to us by trusted sources - some even in our teacher preparation classes or professional development sessions. Additionally, when you start looking into the history of these myths, you find that there was a certain logic at the time they were proposed. As G.K. Chesterton wrote, "All heresy is a truth taught out of proportion," most brain myths begin with a kernel of truth.

I'm developing a presentation for conferences on myths that are popularly held about the brain, looking into how their kernels of truth ballooned into myths and what that means for our classrooms. I have to fit 3-4 myths into a 40 minute presentation (Let's be real; I'll never get to the 4th), so I thought I would do a deeper dive into each of them on the blog. This is the one I see the most online. This is also the one I won't be able to get to in my presentation.

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You have, do doubt, seen at least one of these images roaming around your social media feeds. They claim to be tests of which of your brain hemispheres is dominant based on no more than what you see in an abstract shape. 

They are, of course, just click bait designed to make you comment because no one can see any of the things described in the text. 

These are quite clearly (moving clockwise) an ostrich with bulging eyes, Michael Myers from the Halloween movies, a bird singing to the Lord, and Godzilla. There's nothing else to see here people.   ;^)

But comment people do - a lot. They comment in droves. The popularity of these memes reveal something about us, and it is not which hemisphere is dominant. It's that we desperately want to fit into a category - whether it is a "learning style," and Enneagram score, hemisphere dominance, or which Disney princess Buzz Feed says we are. We like thinking we are special and that we belong to a group of people who are special in the same way as we are. 

I hate to burst your bubble, but it just isn't true. You do not have a dominant hemisphere that changes the way you think about things. If you are creative person, it is not because you think with the right side of your brain more than the left. Likewise, if you are good at math, it is not because you have a stronger left hemisphere. 

Like all of the other myths I've addressed in this series, there is a kernel of truth that got blown all out of proportion. How did we get here?

In the 1940s, neurosurgeons began cutting the corpus callosum as a way of treating some severe forms of epilepsy. For those who may not know, the corpus callosum is the tissue that forms a bridge between the two hemispheres of the brain. It's the red area in this image. It has many purposes, but one of them is communication between the two sides of the brain. The reason it worked for the treatment of some kinds of epilepsy is that those types involved sending a signal from one hemisphere to the other. But this surgery also revealed some things we had not previously known about the responsibilities of each hemisphere.  Because it was the 1940s, however, the tools we have for examining brain activity now did not exist. So, the information they got was painted with a broad brush. 

All of our brain's functions are in some way controlled by parts scattered throughout both hemispheres and the communication between them. The right side of the brain does control more of the areas responsible for spacial awareness and big picture thinking. The left side tends to have a higher hand in perceiving details and language processing. Because they did not yet have MRIs and PET scanners, the nuances of where electrical activity was distributed while doing certain tasks or thinking in certain ways, the very broad understanding became "logic on the left, artsy-ness on the right."

I wasn't able to track down exactly how the idea that you had a dominant hemisphere entered the public consciousness, but I imagine it had some relationship to handedness. If I am right handed, perhaps it stands to reason that I am left-brained. But just because something is logical or reasonable doesn't always mean it is true. 

The truth is that sensory perception, thoughts, memories, emotion, and various types of thinking don't just reside in one particular part of the brain. For example, your ability to recognize the face of a loved one involves several areas across both hemispheres. If you were to damage one of those parts, you might lose some of that functionality, but you wouldn't stop knowing what a face is. Much of your language processing happens on the left side, but I taught a girl whose left hemisphere was removed; with a great deal of work and rehabilitative therapy, she learned to communicate again within months. 

I'm not saying the hemispheres don't matter or even that they don't have separate responsibilities, but I am saying it is more complex and interesting than we give it credit for when we take an online quiz. I am saying that, no matter how artistic you are, you are not "right brained." The ability to do art requires structures from both sides and the ability for those sides to communicate to each other. You may be a math genius, but it does not mean you have a stronger left brain. Math requires both detailed thinking (left) and the ability to fit parts into a whole (right), particularly when it comes to complex problem solving.

Stop trying to fit yourself or your students into a category (more on that next week when we address the myth of learning styles). Appreciate your brain and its 85 million neurons in all of their glorious complexity.