Although distinct skills have been attributed to whichever hemisphere is dominant for ages and seemed to make sense but sadly they have no scientific basis according to a two year research completed by neuroscientists at University of Utah. The study published in the Plos One Journal is based on a two years long study involving scanning the brains of more then a 1000 individuals between the ages of 7-29 while performing such simple tasks such as lying quietly or reading. These scans were used to measure these individuals' brain functional lateralization meaning the specific mental functions occurring on each side of the brain. For accuracy functional lateralization was measured for each pair of 7266 regions of the grey matter.
Analysis of the data collected as a result lead to the conclusion
" An individual brain is not “left-brained” or “right-brained” as a global property, but that asymmetric lateralization is a property of individual nodes or local subnetworks, and that different aspects of the left-dominant network and right-dominant network may show relatively greater or lesser lateralization within an individual. If a connection involving one of the left hubs is strongly left-lateralized in an individual, then other connections in the left-dominant network also involving this hub may also be more strongly left lateralized, but this did not translate to a significantly generalized lateralization of the left-dominant network or right-dominant network. Similarly, if a left-dominant network connection was strongly left lateralized, this had no significant effect on the degree of lateralization within connections in the right-dominant network, except for those connections where a left-lateralized connection included a hub that was overlapping or close to a homotopic right-lateralized hub."
(Read Complete Article)
References:
An Evaluation of the Left-Brain vs. Right-Brain Hypothesis with Resting State Functional Connectivity Magnetic Resonance Imaging(PLOS ONE Journal-August 2013)
Despite what you've been told, you aren't 'left-brained' or 'right-brained' (The Guardian- Nov 2013)
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