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0:00
Hi. I'm Dr. Cynthia Nebel.
Director of Learning Services
at St. Louis University
School of Medicine,
and today I'm going
to talk to you about
Part 2 of learning myths.
0:12
The next myth we'll
talk about is
the left brain versus right
brain dominance myth.
0:20
The idea with left brain
versus right brain dominance
is this idea that there are
some people who
are left-brained.
And so those people tend
to be more analytical,
maybe nerdy, maybe they
are better at math.
Those kinds of things are
associated with this
left-brain dominance,
and right-brained
people tend to be
more creative and artsy
and have better spatial
awareness; that's the theory.
The reality is that we actually
use all of our brains.
So there really isn't this idea
of left-brained
or right-brained.
Let's dig into this
a little bit more.
1:04
Where on earth did
this idea come from
that we have this
hemispheric dominance,
that some people use
their left brains
and some people use
their right brains.
1:15
Well, it turns out that
there is, in fact,
some amount of
lateralization in the brain.
What that means is that
there are some things
that are done in certain
areas of our brain.
When we look at language
processing, for example,
the left side of our
brains does, in fact,
process a little
bit more language.
In particular,
that's where we have
a lot of our
phonological awareness.
A lot of our
auditory information
comes from the left
side of our brains,
and a lot of our articulation
comes from the left side.
But there are other things
that happen on the right
side of our brain.
Some of those things
might include
the spatial awareness that
we talked about earlier
with right-brained people.
But it turns out that we
all use all of that, right?
It's not as if someone
who is left-brained
is better at speaking, right?
That's not something
we often hear.
So this idea of lateralization
is probably where
this came from,
but then it kind of
got taken out of hand.
