Tonight I have reason to rejoice! I get the shivers when I hear people repeating some bit of trite nonsense as if it were scientific fact. We have thousands (Well, probably millions. I cringe.) of these tenacious little nuggets floating around in our culture. The mainstream media goes all starry-eyed for sciency bits of scienceness and simply perpetuates them, then your mom repeats them at Christmas dinner and gets mad when your skeptical uncle takes issue and they’ve both been into the wine so it degenerates into yelling and your sister’s baby is crying… er anyhow…
Neurologist Dr. Steven Novella (host of The Skeptic’s Guide to the Universe) has a post about just such a chunk of bland, simplified pop nonsense on his blog, Neurologica. The article (which you should just click on and read right now) says that there is absolutely no evidence for there being “right-brained” and “left-brained” individuals. It is, in fact, a high-powered myth. Steven says:
”It’s a zombie-meme, the terminator of myths, one of those ideas of popular culture that everyone knows but is simply wrong – the idea that individuals can be categorized as either left-brain or right-brain in terms of their personality and the way they process information.”
It’s so pervasive and hulking I almost want to call it a belief-system in itself, as it leads to and reinforces many oversimplified, erroneous explanations for extremely complex concepts. It gives us a right-brained barrel and a left-brained barrel we can chuck people in. “Hey, we can also chuck girls into the right-brained barrel because they’re inherently worse at math than boys.” (An idea which still hasn’t been proven not to be cultural, like many mental things which are curtly assumed gender-inherent.)
It’s part of a larger problem; I think there exists a gigantic false dichotomy in our culture between science and math based disciplines and creative arts and language. I think we overemphasize the gaps there and try to throw people into neat categories, but it’s really a lot more complicated than that. The best scientists, for example, would never get along without a marriage of technical and creative skills. Most artists perform measurements and ratio calculations often in their work. If this right-brained, left-brained crap was true, we wouldn’t have architects like we do. Buildings would be either falling apart all the time or they would be a lot less interesting to look at.
Anyway, read Dr. Novella’s article and then please run out and tell everyone you know that there’s no such thing as right-brained and left-brained people. (He’s got another interesting, earlier post on the subject featuring a spinning, naked girl silhouette, nipples and all! )
