Just in case your doctor starts spouting some of this nonsense.
http://healthcare.utah.edu/publicaffairs/news/current/08-14-13_brain_personality_traits.html
Chances are, you’ve heard the label of being a “right-brained” or
“left-brained” thinker. Logical, detail-oriented and analytical? That’s
left-brained behavior. Creative, thoughtful and subjective? Your brain’s
right side functions stronger —or so long-held assumptions suggest.
But
newly released research findings from University of Utah
neuroscientists assert that there is no evidence within brain imaging
that indicates some people are right-brained or left-brained.
For
years in popular culture, the terms left-brained and right-brained have
come to refer to personality types, with an assumption that some people
use the right side of their brain more, while some use the left side
more.
Following a two-year study, University of Utah researchers
have debunked that myth through identifying specific networks in the
left and right brain that process lateralized functions.
Lateralization of brain function means that
there are certain mental processes that are mainly specialized to one
of the brain’s left or right hemispheres. During the course of the
study, researchers analyzed resting brain scans of 1,011 people between
the ages of seven and 29. In each person, they studied functional
lateralization of the brain measured for thousands of brain regions
—finding no relationship that individuals preferentially use their left
-brain network or right- brain network more often.
“It’s
absolutely true that some brain functions occur in one or the other side
of the brain. Language tends to be on the left, attention more on the
right. But people don’t tend to have a stronger left- or right-sided
brain network. It seems to be determined more connection by connection, ”
said
Jeff Anderson,
M.D., Ph.D., lead author of the study, which is formally titled “An
Evaluation of the Left-Brain vs. Right-Brain Hypothesis with Resting
State Functional Connectivity Magnetic Resonance Imaging.” It is
published in the journal PLOS ONE this month.
Researchers
obtained brain scans for the population they studied from a database
called INDI, the International Neuroimaging Data-Sharing Initiative.
The participants’ scans were taken during a functional connectivity MRI
analysis, meaning a participant laid in a scanner for 5 to 10 minutes
while their resting brain activity was analyzed.
By viewing brain
activity, scientists can correlate brain activity in one region of the
brain compared to another. In the study, researchers broke up the brain
into 7,000 regions and examined which regions of the brain were more
lateralized. They looked for connections — or all of the possible
combinations of brain regions — and added up the number of connections
for each brain region that was left- lateralized or right-lateralized.
They discovered patterns in brain imaging for why a brain connection
might be strongly left- or right-lateralized, said Jared Nielsen, a
graduate student in neuroscience who carried out the study as part of
his coursework.
“If you have a connection that is strongly left-
lateralized, it relates to other strongly lateralized connection only if
both sets of connections have a brain region in common,” said Nielsen.
Results
of the study are groundbreaking, as they may change the way people
think about the old right-brain versus left-brain theory, he said.
“Everyone
should understand the personality types associated with the terminology
‘left-brained’ and ‘right-brained’ and how they relate to him or her
personally; however, we just don't see patterns where the whole
left-brain network is more connected or the whole right-brain network is
more connected in some people. It may be that personality types have
nothing to do with one hemisphere being more active, stronger, or more
connected,” said Nielsen.
