I Must Ask . . . Right or Left? {part 3}

If passion drives you, let reason hold the reins. –Benjamin Franklin

I really enjoyed hearing from you all last week on the question of whether your ears, eyes and feet are left or right dominant. Your comments were so fun and I loved learning a bit more about each of you. Here are the results:

{Which do you see?
Is it an old woman's profile or
a young woman whose face is turned away?}

As I was browsing the internet for information about dominance or preference for hands, feet, eyes and ears, I inevitably ran across information about being left or right brained. Some of you even talked about it in your comments. In a nutshell here is what it means to be right or left-brain dominant.

If you are right-brain dominant, it is your intuitive, emotional right hemisphere that guides the decisions you make throughout the day.

If you are left-brain dominant, it is your sequential, time-oriented left hemisphere which tells you how to think, what to believe, and what choices to make.

Those who are middle-brain dominant tend to be more flexible than either the left or the right-brain folks; however, you often vacillate between the two hemispheres when you make decisions. You sometimes get confused when decisions need to be made because, neurologically speaking, you could do most tasks through either a left-brain or a right-brain method!

The picture of the two women above is supposed to tell you if you are right or left-brained. I think the first time I saw it was in 4^th or 5^th grade and I always see the old woman first. Really, this drawing is just an optical illusion and has nothing to do with determining which side of the brain is dominant, but I found this colored version of it and wanted to share because this picture really fascinates me.

Another optical illusion which is supposed to tell you at a glance which side of the brain is dominant is this spinning girl. If she is spinning clockwise, it is supposed to mean you are more right-brained. If she is spinning counter-clockwise, it is supposed to mean you are more left-brained.

Steven Novella at NeuroLogica Blog had this to say about the spinning woman.

Sure, we have two hemispheres that operate fine independently and have different abilities, but they are massively interconnected and work together as a seamless whole (providing you have never had surgery to cut your corpus callosum).

We also do have hemispheric dominance, but that determines mostly your handedness and the probability of language being on the right or the left. There is also often asymmetry for memory, with some being right or left hemisphere dominant. But none of this means that your personality or abilities are more right brain or left brain.

Further, how your visual cortex constructs this optical illusion says nothing about your hemispheric dominance, and is absolutely not a quick personality profile.

There was another article somewhere that I can't find again expressing similar sentiments. But this is all in good fun and so today I must ask: are you right-brain or left-brain dominant or both? There are several on-line quizzes that you can take which help you to discover if you are left or right-brained. I took several and liked this one best. But a quick Google search will help you find others.

Different tests gave me different results and even taking the same test twice gave different results. I'm beginning to think this is not an exact science . Maybe there is something to what Steven Novella and others have said about the brain being complexly interconnected.

What I find interesting is that we pretty much all have the same equipment but each of us is unique and individual in how we use that equipment, how we view the world and how we respond to it.