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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Join the conversation on this and other stories
here.
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.
