Deans' stroke musings: What does a scientist think of "right brain/left brain" tests?

Changing stroke rehab and research worldwide now.Time is Brain! trillions and trillions of neurons that DIE each day because there are NO effective hyperacute therapies besides tPA(only 12% effective). I have 523 posts on hyperacute therapy, enough for researchers to spend decades proving them out. These are my personal ideas and blog on stroke rehabilitation and stroke research. Do not attempt any of these without checking with your medical provider. Unless you join me in agitating, when you need these therapies they won't be there.

What this blog is for:

My blog is not to help survivors recover, it is to have the 10 million yearly stroke survivors light fires underneath their doctors, stroke hospitals and stroke researchers to get stroke solved. 100% recovery. The stroke medical world is completely failing at that goal, they don't even have it as a goal. Shortly after getting out of the hospital and getting NO information on the process or protocols of stroke rehabilitation and recovery I started searching on the internet and found that no other survivor received useful information. This is an attempt to cover all stroke rehabilitation information that should be readily available to survivors so they can talk with informed knowledge to their medical staff. It lays out what needs to be done to get stroke survivors closer to 100% recovery. It's quite disgusting that this information is not available from every stroke association and doctors group.

Sunday, February 28, 2016

What does a scientist think of "right brain/left brain" tests?

Hopefully your doctor doesn't fall into this left brain/right brain crap. Even if Dr. Jill Bolte-Taylor believes in it wholeheartedly.
http://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-trending-35640368
Millions of Facebook users have done the online tests.

Maybe you've noticed the recent spate of "brain tests" making the rounds online.

There are different versions - several have been shared hundreds of thousands of times on Facebook - but most of them take the form of a quiz which purports to show how "left-brained" or "right-brained" you are. The idea is that the left side of the brain is associated more with logic and rationality and the right side controls creativity and emotion.
So is there any evidence that the two sides of the brain correspond to those particular characteristics?

"It is certainly the case that some people have more methodical, logical cognitive styles, and others more uninhibited, spontaneous styles," says Jeffrey Anderson, a brain researcher at the University of Utah. "This has nothing to do on any level with the different functions of the [brain's] left and right hemisphere."
Anderson led a team that looked at the brains of more than a thousand people and measured strong connections on both sides of the brain. They found that these connections were distributed fairly evenly - in other words, it wasn't the case that some people had stronger connections on one side of the brain or the other.
So what explains the origins of the right/left myth? It stems from Nobel Prize-winning research which showed that different sections of the brain have different functions. But separating the brain's two halves into "logical" and "emotional" hemispheres appears to be a function of pop psychology, not science.
"The pop culture idea (creative vs. logical traits) has no support in the neuroscience community and flies in the face of decades of research about brain organization, the functional roles of the two brain hemispheres and evidence from patients with lesions in one or the other hemisphere in the brain," Anderson told BBC Trending via email.

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A 2011 BBC Radio 4 programme debunked the right brain/left brain theory along with other popular brain myths, such as the idea that we only use 10% of our grey matter, or that listening to Mozart makes us smarter.
Now here at BBC Trending we hate to ruin the party, so by all means continue to take those Facebook brain quizzes if you like, but remember it's a just bit of fun - not a bit of science.