Brains exhibit bilateral anatomy but functional asymmetries emerge during development. Left and right hemispheres show different maturation rates, grey/white matter densities, and activity patterns. Cognitive tasks are distributed unevenly across hemispheres rather than strictly segregated. Attempts to classify people as left- or right-brain dominant have not found clear individual dominance. Many neuroscience reports generalize across structures without distinguishing hemispheres. Duplicate structures are not redundant; they support distributed processing. Disruptions or atypical lateralization may contribute to clinical disorders. A closer look reveals nuanced, distributed processing across hemispheres.
Like the rest of our bodies, our brains have bilateral symmetry-the anatomies of the left and right hemispheres are mirror images. We have a left and right cortex, a left and right amygdala, a left and right hippocampus, and so on. In a lot of neuroscience research, it's common to just, well, ignore this fact. Countless articles talk about how the amygdala regulates emotion, how the hippocampus stores memories, how the prefrontal cortex provides executive control-but without discriminating between the left and right structures.
The left side of the brain is analytical and concerned with facts and figures, whereas the right side of the brain is creative, artistic, and intuitive. Like many popular ideas about neuroscience, this isn't actually true. In fact, direct attempts to measure whether individuals (with different temperaments, personalities, and talents) have a right-brain bias or a left-brain bias have shown that there's no obvious dominance
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