Right- or Left-Brained? There's No Such Thing

If you've long lauded your powerful right brain for providing you with your artistic prowess, some University of Utah researchers have bad news for you: The whole right-brain/left-brain thing isn't true. The neuroscientists analyzed 1,011 brain scans to come to their conclusion about whether people are indeed right-brain (ie, creative) or left-brain (ie, logical) dominant, and uncovered no proof that we actually use one side of our brain more heavily or have more robust neural connections there, reports the Salt Lake Tribune.

To understand how the study worked, a quick science lesson/refresher: Lateralization is no myth, and refers to mental functions that largely rely on one side of the brain; for instance, speech is a mostly left-brain function, reports LiveScience. The scientists divided the brain into 7,000 regions and looked for connections. They counted the number of connections that could be described as left- or right-lateralized, and uncovered neither a preference for one side nor a stronger neural network on one side, reports Science Daily. "We just don't see patterns where the whole left-brain network is more connected, or the whole right-brain network is more connected in some people," says one of the study's authors. (Click to read about another surprising brain-related discovery.)