I read an interesting report from the University of Utah recently which pleases the curmudgeonly part of my thought processes. [Jeffery F. Anderson, M.D., Associate Professor of Radiology—lead author–No ‘Left-brained’ or ‘Right-brained,’ U Study Finds, Continuum, p. 10, Spring, 2014]. It is part of civilized society, pop culture, and pseudoscience to identify people and their behavior as being ‘left brained’ or ‘right brained,’ and it is not uncommon to see articles explaining to the uninformed the characteristics and personality function of people lumped into one or the other category. Left brained people are logical, organized, objective uncreative, math oriented, analytical, and probably think in terms of evidence and science. Right brained people are introspective, sensitive, artistic, creative, subjective, and avoid science in favor of art or things of the spirit. Some of us use the left side of our brain, and some the right side for the function of our personalities. Right?

Apparently not, the two-year University of Utah neuroscience study reveals. The university scientists studied personality types using brain scans in over a thousand subjects ranging in age from seven to twenty-nine. Every test subject had scans at rest, and the lateralization of their brains was measured in thousands of regions of their brains. There is lateralization of brains, of course, including language on the left, attention on the right, vision posteriorly, and smell anteriorly. But, the study debunked the concept—the unproved hypothesis of left brain/right brain determination of personality or that anyone’s personality derives from preferential function of one side of the brain or another.

The results of the scanning study revealed that there is no relationship of preferential use of a brain network from either the left or the right side to determine personality traits. People do not have stronger left versus right sided brain network involvement. There are brain regions that are specialized, but they are very nearly the same in everyone and have nothing to do with personality. Individual personality is determined by connectivity of nearly infinite complexity which is far more complicated than mere sidedness. The final conclusion of the study was, “…we just don’t see patterns where the whole left brain network is more connected or the whole right brain is more connected in some people. It may be that personality types have nothing to do with one hemisphere being more active, stronger, or more connected.”