Somewhere along the way, a real but narrow finding about brain hemispheres got flattened into a personality quiz: are you logical and left-brained, or artsy and right-brained? Magazines ran the quiz, teachers repeated the split, and it felt like neuroscience because it borrowed neuroscience vocabulary. Actual brain scans tell a much less tidy story. Nearly every task, whether it's solving an equation or composing a melody, lights up both hemispheres working together, with no clean division of labor between them.
What you were taught
Left-brained people are logical, right-brained people are creative
What we know now
Brain imaging shows both hemispheres work together for most tasks. Some functions are lateralized, but people are not globally "left-brained" or "right-brained" personality types.
Updated understanding emerged around 2013
No. You are not locked into a logical left brain or a creative right brain.
Brain scans do not sort people into two tidy types. For most tasks, including math and music, both hemispheres pitch in. The split you learned in school is a personality quiz wearing a lab coat.
The version most people remember is simple: left side = numbers, logic, lists; right side = art, intuition, color. Magazines ran the quiz. Teachers repeated it because it felt like neuroscience. It borrowed real vocabulary and then flattened it.
Workbooks promised you could "wake up" your neglected hemisphere. That story is comforting. It is also not what the scans show.
The pop myth has real roots, which is partly why it survived.
Roger Sperry's split-brain research in the 1970s and 1980s showed the hemispheres handle different jobs. Language often leans left. Attention to space often leans right. That is genuine lateralization.
The leap came later: whole people sorted into "left-brained" or "right-brained" types. Betty Edwards's 1979 book Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain pushed the idea into art class. Online quizzes finished the job. Entertainment value is high. Anatomical accuracy is not.
Location still matters. A stroke in the wrong patch can take language, movement, or vision with it. In most right-handed people, language processing is heavily left-sided. Spatial attention often favors the right.
What does not show up is a clean personality map. Harvard Health notes that if you scanned a mathematician and an artist, you would not expect an obvious structural split, and in large groups no clear pattern emerges.
The 2013 University of Utah study led by Jared Nielsen put that claim to a harder test. Researchers looked at resting-state brain scans from more than 1,000 people between ages 7 and 29, dividing the brain into thousands of regions. They found no evidence that some people are globally left-dominant or right-dominant. The authors concluded that "left-brained" and "right-brained" describe a figure of speech, not wiring.
Their paper still found lateralized hubs and networks (language regions on the left, attention networks on the right, for example). The mistake is treating that local specialization as a whole-brain identity badge.
If school taught you the left/right personality split, you learned a catchy sorting hat, not a scan result.
You can be analytical and creative in the same skull. Both hemispheres are already on the job. The update is narrower: brains specialize by region and task, not by assigning you a team jersey.
No, not as a reliable brain type. Imaging does not support a global left-vs-right personality split. Both hemispheres contribute to most thinking, though specific functions can lean left or right.
Not entirely. Some functions are lateralized (language often left, visuospatial processing often right). The myth is turning that into whole-person categories.
Nielsen and colleagues analyzed more than 1,000 resting-state scans and found no evidence that individuals are globally "left-brained" or "right-brained." Lateralization appears local, not a single dominant side for personality.
Mostly as entertainment. Smithsonian notes they reflect preferences more than neuroanatomy.
1970s · Psychology
1990s · Science
1990s · Science