American scientists have shown that the division of the human brain into hemispheres responsible for the logical and the emotional aspect is erroneous.
According to the widespread idea about brain functioning, the left hemisphere is responsible for logics, and the right one – for emotions and creativity. Moreover, it is believed that people are divided into specific types (rationalists and intuitionalists), depending on the predominance of one or another hemisphere.
Jeffrey Anderson from the University of Utah conducted a special research – he compared the functioning of two brain hemispheres in more than 1,000 people. It turned out that the links between the hemispheres were distributed roughly the same way: in other words, none of the people tested had stronger links in one of the hemispheres.
Of course, some people behave more logically and methodically, while others improvise or act more intuitively. However, this phenomenon has nothing to do with the right and left hemisphere functions, as Anderson believes.
According to the scientist, this myth has arisen due to the Nobel-Prize-winning study of Roger Sperry about the functions of different hemispheres in 1981. However, the idea to call them logical and emotional belongs exclusively to popular psychology. It is neither supported by research on brain organization and functioning, nor by medical reports on patients who suffered a hemisphere damage. The popularity of this myth is most likely based on people’s tendency to think in binary oppositions.
