Jill MedingerThe latest viral video visual illusion is a horse walking, but whether you see the horse walking forwards or backwards is said to reveal whether you are a left-brained, ie. scientific and logical, or right-brained, artistic and creative. Of course, there are many who say the question is much more complex and the answer more nuanced, but we still think it’s fun. Which way do you see the horse walking?
According to Brittanica.com, “The idea that there are right-brained and left-brained people is a myth. Although we all obviously have different personalities and talents, there’s no reason to believe these differences can be explained by the dominance of one half of the brain over the other half.” In fact, one recent study has shown that there is no evidence at all of one side of the brain having dominance at all.
While it is true that each side of the brain is responsible for different tasks, and some of them can be classified in this way, many of the processes that we classify as either right-brained or left-brained are usually some combination of the two. The idea most likely stemmed from the experiments of Roger Sperry in the 1970s and 80s, which studied people who had the corpus callosum, or the piece of the brain that connects the two hemispheres, severed.