Are you right-brained? People tend to characterize you as creative, subjective, and open-minded. Or are you left-brained? You’re more analytical, you pay attention to detail, and your more logical. Turns out you’re neither. Researchers from the University of Utah found that “right brained” people don’t use either side more than the other, and vice versa, through brain imaging.   

There are some functions that occur in one side of the brain though. For example, language tends to be connected to the left side while attention tends to be connected to the right side. But the idea that people are stronger on one side over the other was found to be a myth. Jeff Anderson, a researcher at Utah University, conducted a study involving over 1,000 people between the ages of 7 and 29. All of the participants had functional connectivity MRI’s done while their brains were resting for ten minutes. The researches divvied up the brain into 7,000 regions. They analyzed these scans and reached the conclusion that people don’t have a stronger side of the brain network. It depends more on a connection-to-connection basis. 

I think these findings are quite important. Many people use these terms with much confidence as if it’s common knowledge. There were never any conclusive studies done to test this thinking until now. Now we believe that it’s not true. This doesn’t put an end to the terms right-brained or left-brained. I believe people can still classify themselves as either of these depending on their personal characteristics. They just have to know that the brain actually doesn’t work that way. 

In a side comment, this study was published on PLOS ONE. We went over these journals in class this Tuesday and we talked about how difficult it can be to get a paper published to one of these journals. By this study and paper being published, it makes me believe that their study and conclusion must have some ground. Being that right/left brainess was widely accepted knowledge, the fact that this study made it past all the checks in the scientific world must say that other scientists are in agreement with these findings.