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Are you a left-brainer or a right-brainer?
Are you analytical and methodical, or creative and artistic?
A popular theory is that people are either left-brained or right-brained, meaning that one side of their brain is dominant. According to this theory, if your left side is dominant, you’re mostly analytical and methodical in your thinking. On the other hand, if your right side is dominant, you tend to be more creative or artistic.
Unfortunately, this false idea has taken root in many organizations. It is often brought up in conversations about a left-brained management team versus a right-brained marketing team, or a left-brained project manager versus a right-brained software development team. The problem with this and many other myths is that there is a very small grain of truth to it, but certainly not as huge and as precise as many take it to be.
The small grain of truth stems from research that was done from the 1960s onwards by 1981 Nobel Prize-winning neuropsychologist Roger Sperry and one of his students, Michael Gazzaniga. They studied patients whose brain was quite literally split in half. As scientists figured out in the 1960s, patients who suffered from severe epilepsy could — as a last resort — have the bridge between the two halves of their brain, the corpus callosum, physically cut to ease their suffering…
