Welcome back to The Editorial loyal readers and prepare yourselves for what is to come. It’s myth busting time again as we take on the treasured ideas and psychobabble of the so-called communication experts and expose them for what they really are… complete nonsense. Previous editions of The Editorial have destroyed such myths as non-verbal communication and body language but this month I find myself moved to take on much bigger prey.

This is an idea so ingrained that for some of you what you are about to read will shake the very foundations of your beliefs. You may be led to question your existence and overall purpose in the universe but fear not – for from the truth freedom will come.

For others of you there is a bigger problem. You have been making money out of this idea for decades and have sucked in everyone you have come into contact with. It could be that your livelihood is about to end. But to you also I say, fear not! In this case the truth will probably just bring about destitution but it is only a short-term problem. Let’s face it if you could create a gravy train out of the nonsense you have been peddling to date then it is only a matter of time before you come up with brand new nonsense that will prove equally effective at earning you a living while producing no discernible benefit to anyone else.

So what is it that we are sinking our teeth into this month? Why it’s the left-brain versus right-brain – the theory of halfwits!

Left Brain versus Right Brain – for half-brained people

Many of the commonly accepted ideas about right- brain and left-brain differences are nothing more than pop psychology and they most certainly do not represent well-documented science.

The best-supported distinctions about right and left hemisphere specialization are about 95% of right-handed people have language in the left hemisphere. It is also true that the right hemisphere contributes more to emotional expression and spatial processing (such as reading maps). That’s about it! Most of the other speculations that appear in popular sources (for example, that the right brain is “artistic” or holistic while the left brain is “analytic” or drab and ordinary) are not supported by precise, replicated experiments.

In fact the whole thing dates back to the 1860’s when two blokes by the names of Broca and Wernicke made some findings about the role of the left hemisphere in language. Then in the 1960’s Roger Sperry and his colleagues bisected the corpus callosum and other cerebral commissures (white matter connection between the hemispheres) of patients in order to control intractable epilepsy. They then found the separated hemispheres of their patients to have different specialised abilities, the left’s mainly related to language comprehension and production, the right’s mainly related to spatial perception.

And that was all it took. The nutters jumped into action and soon long lists of supposed left-brain and right-brain functions were generated. The left-brain was associated with Western logic and the right brain with Eastern mysticism. Western education was supposed to neglect the right hemisphere and whole-brain learning became the goal. Children were classified as left brained or right brained on the basis of simple tests that had no validity and no reliability.

This, in turn, lead to views that the right hemisphere was inactive and had to be ‘activated’ so whole industries sprung up with various wacky ways of turning on half your brain.

If it is starting to sound silly to you that’s because it is silly!

We do know that there is hemispheric specialization. Brain scanning techniques like MRI are capable of pinpointing tiny areas of activity in the brain and many psychological functions are being found to involve one hemisphere more than the other. Trained musicians are said to use the left hemisphere relatively more for judgment of relative pitch, for example. Object recognition is said to be better on the right. Guided visual search is better on the left, and so forth. Eventually there will be a catalogue of thousands of skills that are better on the left or the right, or the front or the back, or in one lobe or another.

But this is a far cry from “right brain/left brain thinking.” We might speak just as logically of “front vs. back” thinking, because some tasks will be performed well in the frontal lobes, others in the occipital lobe at the back of the brain. How about “mid-brain thinking” for tasks performed well by the parietal lobe?

The truth is that the brain is full of specialized areas that are activated by particular tasks. In normal thinking, including intuition and artistic activity, areas from various locations in the brain are activated at the same time, and they work together. In short, you are neither left-brained nor right-brained because the distinction does not exist.

Sure, we have two hemispheres that operate fine independently and have different abilities, but they are massively interconnected and work together as a seamless whole (providing you have never had surgery to cut your corpus callosum).

You are whole-brained and everything works together!

And what about personality testing?

Of course that means that everything based on left-brain/right-brain thinking is also rubbish and that includes all of those simple personality tests designed to winkle out which of your hemispheres is doing all the work and which you might need to work on.

No one simple test can ever give you a reliable measure of ability. You need to do a battery of tests and look for patterns of strengths and weaknesses. Someone could get lucky on one test, or get stuck on a single test, and therefore it says very little about their overall ability. Also, any test, in order to be usable, must be validated and calibrated. That means the test must be applied to known quantities to see if it is actually measuring something, and if it is reliable. Will the same person score similarly at different times, for example? What does it really mean if you take 10 minutes to complete the test versus 20 minutes?

Any personality test taken in and of itself is unreliable and certainly any test that is based on identifying whether you are right or left-brained and then assigning personality traits to each of the hemispheres is complete and utter nonsense.

Seriously… get in touch

Try to let everything above sink in for a bit and if you are in need of therapy then give me call. What I can tell you is that if you lie down on the couch on your left side you will stimulate your left hemisphere more. If you lie on your right side you will stimulate the right hemisphere more. Lying through your teeth is specifically reserved for the therapist! If you would like to know more about personality testing and why it is mostly useless let me know and I will write about it in the next Editorial. See you next month.