You Are Not Right-Brained
You are not left-brained either.
A creative right half of the brain and an analytical left half don’t exist. The education system didn’t weaken your right-sided talent and force you to favor left-sided order. These ideas aren’t pseudoscience, but they are old science.
The notion of a dominant side of the brain similar to a dominant right or left hand stood on real evidence for a short time, but we have further evidence now that both halves of our brains are far more complicated.
The scientific method is frustrating because we want consistent answers that comfort us. If we spend years cutting fat out of our diet, we don’t want to hear that advice was based on insufficient research. If we learn our left-handedness makes us more suited to the life of a creative artist than our analytical 9-to-5 job, we don’t want that science overturned either.
When Roger W. Sperry won the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1981 for his work with cerebral hemispheres, he warned the public not to jump to conclusions. But we jumped anyway, until research from the University of Utah in 2013 took away our trampoline by overturning the right-brain left-brain hypothesis. A new book out of Harvard suggests the brain is better divided between the top and bottom.
Scientific hypotheses come and go, improving incrementally on our limited understanding of the universe. When the public heard about the right-brain left-brain hypothesis, they relied on it like an answer bound inside an encyclopedia or the final answer in a trivia contest.
You are correct. Applaud the left side of your brain. You win the chicken dinner!
Except, we don’t use encyclopedias anymore. We’ve moved on to the far more malleable and far more intelligent Wikipedia. Wikipedia is constantly changing, not because trolls vandalize it, but because modern science learns at an unprecedented rate. What was once the right answer in the neurological category is now the wrong answer.
Too many people love science only for its right answers. They like math because 2+2=4. They love Neil DeGrasse Tyson and his pithy quotes: “The good thing about science is that it’s true whether or not you believe in it.”
Too often this sounds like more of the trivia contest. One group just wants to tell the other group that they’re wrong and have therefore lost. How often would these correct scientists like to hear in a public forum that their latest hypothesis was proven incorrect? How much would they like the uncertain world of science if they didn’t already sit on the bestseller’s list?
Few authors promote our collective and individual ignorance because not many audiences want to read about that.
If science proves anything, it’s that we have a lot to learn. Whether we believe in left-brain dominance, that the solar system consists of nine planets, or the healthiness of fat-free food, our knowledge rests on the encyclopedias and research of the moment.
We want to be correct-brained. That isn’t hard to understand either, but it also may be a hypothesis whose time is past.