Scarecrow, Please Call Your Office...

At The Great Courses, the site's "Great Courses Daily" blog transcribes some of a lecture from Dr. Indre Viskontas about the common understandings of the way that the hemispheres of the brain interact with each other.

Most of us have probably heard people describe themselves as "left-brain" or "right-brain," emphasizing whether or not our first tendencies are to handle the world analytically or aesthetically. Dr. Viskontas traces the history of how we first began to learn that different regions of the brain tend to handle inputs differently, and how there's some correlation between areas that handle and respond in a more fact-based way and others that seem more active when a person is being creative or artistic.

But the kind of hard divisions we're used to talking about, he says, are mostly bunk, or at least very exaggerated. For one, some of the first experiments that showed the hemispheres tending to handle different sets of responses were conducted on people who had the connections between the two brain hemispheres severed. This commissurotomy was done on patients with severe epilepsy and often produced good results in limiting seizures, but today those patients are far more likely to be treated with medication.

In any event, the experiments were done on people who had two sides of their brains that couldn't talk to each other -- a condition that most of the human race does not endure. So even if one side or another of our brains tends to be a center for one kind of information processing and activity it doesn't matter, since for almost all of us both sides of our brains talk to each other. Which means the suggestion that behavior, responses and the like can be sort of predicted depending on which hemisphere is active in people is not really accurate either, because most of us will use both halves of our brain in handling most situations.

Except, of course, for modern politicians, most media folks and celebrities who think they should bother us with their thoughts on important matters. These people tend to use neither half of their brain most of the time.