Mind Hacks

Hack #69. Use Your Right Brain—and Your Left, Too

The logical left brain and intuitive right brain metaphor is popular, but the real story of the difference between the two halves of your brain is more complex and more interesting.

There’s a grain of truth in all the best myths, and this is true for the left-brain/right-brain myth. Our cortex is divided into left and right hemispheres, and they do seem to process information differently, but exactly how they do this isn’t like the story normally told by management gurus and the self-help literature. As with many scientific myths, the real story is less intuitive but more interesting.

Our brains follow the general pattern of the rest of our bodies: two of everything down the sides and one of everything down the middle. With the brain, the two halves are joined directly in the subcortex, but in the cortex the two halves, called hemispheres, have a gap between them. They are connected by a tight bunch of some 250 million nerve fibers, called the corpus callosum, which runs between the two hemispheres (it’s not the only way for information to cross the hemispheres, but it’s the most important).

Each hemisphere is wired up to sense and act on the opposite side of the body. So information from your right goes to the left side of the visual cortex, and signals from your left motor cortex control your right hand. For higher functions, in which information from both senses is combined, the two hemispheres seem to have different strengths and ...