No, You're Not Left-Brained or Right-Brained | Psychology Today - 0 views
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there’s no such thing as right-brained or left-brained.
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The left cerebral hemisphere controls the right side of the body, and about 90 percent of people prefer to write with their right hand, indicating left brain motor dominance.
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language skills are left lateralized, or largely controlled by the left hemisphere, in over 90 percent of people. That includes 78 percent of people who are not right-handed.
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The left cerebral hemisphere is to the “right-brained” poet or novelist as the hamstrings and quadriceps are to a competitive sprinter
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Because the ability to understand and produce language is focused in the left side of the brain in almost everyone, caricaturing these creative types as using their right brain more than their left brain is silly.
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visual-spatial abilities—localized to the right cerebral hemisphere—are skills that are absolutely critical for “left-brained” talents like science or engineering.
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But much of our obsession with the brain’s left and right cerebral hemispheres may have started with studies of split brain patients in the ‘50s. During this time, people who suffered multiple seizures a day underwent intense surgery to treat their epilepsy.
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To calm the electrical storms that ravaged these patients’ brains, the nerve fibers connecting the left and right hemispheres of the brain were cut. These fibers are collectively known as the corpus callosum
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Once the corpus callosum is severed on the operating table, the new split brain patient appears astonishingly normal at first glance
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But careful experiments reveal that this person is really two persons, two streams of consciousness in one body
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The right hemisphere cannot speak, but it can point to words like “yes” or “no” to answer a question
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Each hemisphere, it seems, maintains independent beliefs and personalities, challenging the notion that we are each an indivisible “self.”