You probably have heard about this. Some of us are supposed to be left brain dominated and others right brain dominated. Not that we have two brains. What it means is that in some of us one of our brain ‘hemispheres’ plays a dominant role.
Our brains have two lobes or hemispheres – left part and right part. It is generally believed that our capabilities such as speech, artistic abilities, creativity, emotions, and so on, are ‘left brain activities’. And things like reasoning, logic, mathematics etc. are typically right brain activities.Most of us are good at only one of these things – we are either good in linguistic abilities, are very creative, and of course tend to be a bit emotional than rational; OR we could be totally rational, logical, great mathematical geeks, and so on. It is rare to find both in the same person.
The sexists among us even go to the extent of saying that women are left brained and men are right brained! Afterall, men have to be ‘right’ always 😉
I recently watched one video in which one popular Yoga Guru claims that his ‘Yogic breathing technique’ can ‘balance’ the left and right brains! According to him, our health problems are due to imbalance between our left and right brains. Since most of us are either left brained or right brained, naturally we fall sick – it is as simple as that.
Just do his Yogic breathing, and voila, you are free from any disease! Height of imagination!
How did we get this idea of left brain and right brain dominance? That is an interesting story.
Way back in 1800s, we had very few gadgets to observe the functioning of our brain. And of course, one cannot cut open the brain of a live person to see how it works! Can we? It is a different matter that ancient Greeks did exactly that. I will come to that, later on.
In 1860s a French Surgeon namely Paul Broca studied some of his patients who had lost their ability to speak after suffering a paralytic stroke. Broca found that some specific region in the left hemisphere of the brain in these patients was damaged. This made Broca conclude that this region is the place where speech production takes place.
Later in 1870s a German neurologist Carl Wernicke observed that there is another region in the brain, the damage to which caused language perception problems in some of his patients.
People with damage caused to that region could connect words, but the phrases would lack meaning. These patients had problems in understanding what was told to them or what they read, though they were perfectly all right in their listening/reading capabilities.
This region was also in the left hemisphere of the brain.
In due course, each of these regions came to be known after these two great scientists, as Broca’s area - responsible for speech production, and Wernicke’s area – responsible for speech perception. Both in the left brain.That means, both speaking as well as comprehending spoken speech was a left-brain activity. That was the origin of ‘left brain’ – ‘right brain’ domination theory.
Considering the fact that each of these great scientists did their marvelous work totally unaided by the sophisticated equipment that we have today, their work was a landmark in the study of human Mind.
However, today we have very sophisticated tools such as functional MRI scanners that allow us to take a complete video of the brain functioning without even cutting open the brain. Of course, we are yet far from reading your thoughts using these scanners, but can decipher lot of ‘high level’ happenings in the brain. For example, these machines can tell us that you are thinking, but they cannot tell us exactly what you are thinking about!
Recent research has shown that Broca and Wernicke area are just some of the areas responsible for the speech production and comprehension. The entire game is not just restricted to these areas. Any complex linguistic activity in fact, involves the entire brain – both left hemisphere as well as the right hemisphere.
So, the ‘left brain’ and ‘right brain’ ideas are a bit out dated. But strangely, these are still taught to medical students, and people like our Yoga Guru use them to conjecture their weird theories!
So next time when someone asks you whether you are left brained or right brained, tell them that you are full brained – left, right, and central 😉
A series revolving around Mind – Science of Mind, Philosophy of Mind, Notions of reality, Mind modulation, Domains beyond Mind, and so on. © Dr. King 2019
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