There is popularly this belief that the hemispheres of the brain represent different characteristics, the left more artistic and the right more logical. The truth is that science says that there is no dominance of the right or left hemisphere. In a study published in the journal PloS One , a team of scientists looked at the brains of more than 1,000 people and found no evidence of significant differences in the dominance of the brain’s hemispheres between individuals.
However, there are differences between the hemispheres. It is possible that no one half is more dominant than the other, but our brain is divided into two hemispheres and they are not the same. They are very similar and redundant, since most of the processes that we will find on the left side are also carried out on the right side and vice versa, but they are not identical.
Both sides of the brain have “the ability to express appropriate feelings, appetites, and impulses, the ability [for] learning, memory, logic, etc., the ability to maintain proper thresholds and tolerance for frustration and failure, and for recovery rapidly from its effects, the ability to maintain effective and well-modulated defense reactions (i.e., repression, denial, simulation, rationalization, blaming, withdrawal, fantasy, obsessive-compulsive behavior, and body reaction patterns involving eating, breathing, metabolism , etc.) “, as stated in the book ” Disorders of the Nervous System: A Primer “ in which the authors quote Harold Wolff, one of the great brain scientists of the 20th century.
Despite the density of text, the bottom line is simple: almost everything about what makes us human exists on both sides of the brain.
Do you need proof? If we remove a hemisphere of the brain of a 3-month-old baby, a surgery doctors sometimes perform for severe epilepsy and other disorders, that baby can still grow up with normal memories and a normal personality. The hemispherectomy has been carried out “hundreds of times” in the last century, according to Scientific American magazine.
So what is the difference between the two hemispheres?
Generally, the left side of the brain controls the right side of the body, and the right side of the brain controls the left side of the body . Everything gets complicated for vision: the nerves on the left side of both eyes connect to the left side of the brain, and the nerves on the right side of both eyes connect to the right side of the brain.
Where does the myth of the creative side and the analytical side come from?
In the 19th century, a pair of neuroscientists, Pierre Paul Broca and Karl Wernicke, discovered that people who ‘struggled’ with language processing tended to damage specific areas on the left side of their brains. The researchers concluded that those two areas were important for language processing, announcing to the world that language lived in the left hemisphere . This idea is probably the root of this notion that the left brain is more creative and the right brain is more analytical.
Later, Robert Louis Stevenson’s novel “The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” helped spread the idea of the left and right brain in popular culture.
However, the asymmetries found by Broca and Wernicke are not consistent from brain to brain. And, in about 5% of right-handed people, the key language processing centers are on the right side of the brain, and in 30% of left-handed people, these centers are on the right side of the brain . Also, in most people, both hemispheres participate in some aspect of speech. People with damaged left hemisphere can relearn speech using the right hemisphere.
With this we put an end to the myth.
