Are you right-brained or left-brained?

Just Google "right-brained left brained quiz" and you'll get 10 different sites  on the first page that offer a quiz to help you determine whether you use the right or left hemisphere of your brain more, in the same way that the majority of us are either right or left handed.  If you are artistic, creative, think in abstract concepts, and messy, you will be told you are right-brained.  If you are good at math and/or science, analyzing things, and are clean and organized, you will be told you are left-brained.

A popular visual representation of
the right/left brained hypothesis.

 But do humans really develop to use one half of their brain more often than the other?  Do our students preferentially use one side of their brain more than the other, and are physiologically disposed to be more creative or more analytical?  Should we account for and accommodate these unalterable differences in our lesson plans?

Neural research would say not! Upon analyzing MRI scans of brains at rest, Nielson et. al. (2013) found that while certain functions are localized to the right or left hemisphere, individuals did not show an overall increased activity in either the right or left hemisphere. They also found that there were no gender differences in neural activity.  Despite this, Dekker et. al. (2012), who surveyed 242 primary and secondary teachers from the UK and the Netherlands, found that more than 80% of the teachers believed that hemispheric dominance could explain differences between learners.  

The myth originated from studies of patients who had their corpus callosum, the bridge between the two hemispheres, cut, as John Geake (2008) discusses in his overview of various neuromyths that persist in the field of education.  When cut, the two hemispheres showed to perform different functions.  However, these patients were examples of abnormal functioning, whose hemispheres could not communicate like the average human's do.  Glossing over this detail, the public developed the myth that one can be right brained or left brained.    

There is some degree of truth in the myth, though.  Research has established that, in right-handed people at least, the right hemisphere dominates at tasks requiring visual and spatial cognition, while the left hemisphere dominates in speech (Kim et. al., 1991).  Interestingly, this is often switched in left-handed individuals.  This pattern of hemispheric specialization contributes to and helps perpetuate the myth of right/left brained dominance. Our students are still not right or left brain dominant, and this categorization does not need to be used as a factor in instructional design and should not have any legitimacy as a factor in educational decisions.       


References

Dekker, S., Lee, N. C., Howard-Jones, P., & Jolles, J. (2012). Neuromyths in education: Prevalence and predictors of misconceptions among teachers. Front. Psychol. 3(429).

Geake, J. (2008). Neuromythologies in education. Educational Research, 50(2), 123-133.

Kim, S. G., Ashe, J., Hendrich, K., & Georgopoulos, A. P. (1991). Cortex: Hemispheric Asymmetry and Handedness. J. Biol, Chem, 266, 23453.

Nielsen, J. A., Zielinski, B. A., Ferguson, M. A., Lainhart, J. E., & Anderson, J. S. (2013). An evaluation of the left-brain vs. right-brain hypothesis with resting state functional connectivity magnetic resonance imaging. PloS one, 8(8), e71275.