Exploring the origins of left brain/right brain narrative and its successive incarnations. An invitation to think about the narratives we adopt as therapists (maybe even without knowing it!).
They say: never let the truth get in the way of a good story. But I think this phrase was meant to be a joke. Especially, when it comes to using neuroscience in psychotherapy.
The right brain is emotional, the left brain is rational. The left brain is about maths/science, the right brain is about creativity/art. The left brain is verbal and detail oriented. The right brain is intuitive and holistic. Some people are dominated by their left hemisphere, and some people by their right. We can even think of civilisations as being left hemisphere, or right hemisphere dominated and therefore out balance.
Right brain/left brain is a powerful narrative and it is one that has long captivated therapists' imagination.
Part of its power, I think, lies in the fact that it uses the split – a hallmark of many powerful stories. In the paragraph above, if you were to anthropomorphise the two sides, it's easy to choose which one you want to be, right? We are rooting for the right hemisphere, the underdog who wins in the end.
In fact, I can think of another powerful story that uses a "split" to create a compelling narrative. "Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" by Robert Louis Stevenson. This story has captivated generations of readers and continues to do so today. Dr. Jekyll is an outwardly respected Victorian gentleman and scientist with a secret, unsavory side. He finds a solution to his problem by inventing a potion that allows him to "split" his multifaceted personality into the honorable Dr. Jekyll and his shadow self, the instinct-driven, aggressive, and animal-like Mr. Hyde. This split lets Dr. Jekyll maintain his civilized existence while Mr. Hyde indulges in darker urges. One split, Victorian gentleman's problem solved and our attention captivated!
I was astonished to discover that the story of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde was inspired by the advances in neuroscience during the Victorian era. Paul Broca, known for identifying Broca's area in the brain responsible for speech production, and Carl Wernicke, who identified the area involved in understanding speech, were contemporaries of Robert Louis Stevenson. The groundbreaking discoveries of Broca's and Wernicke's areas, both located in the left brain hemisphere (for most people), led to a localisationist movement craze, that assigned very specific functions to specific areas of the brain.
Because language, speech production, and comprehension appeared to be localized in the left hemisphere, it was speculated that other "civilised" traits—such as logic, masculinity, morality, and refinement—were also the province of this hemisphere. Consequently, the right hemisphere was left to be associated to, for that era, less desirable "scraps": the primitive, the animal, the feminine, and the emotional.
Even the idea of hemispheric "imbalance" seems to have been around in the Victorian era, with many mental and social problems being attributed to an enlarged, therefore dominant, right hemisphere.
Fast forward to today, and the tables have turned. The so-called "left hemisphere traits" are no longer as culturally dominant or popular, and the very existence of "feminine" and "masculine" essential characteristics is now being questioned. The right hemisphere has reclaimed its status of "divine", its righteous (pun intended) place of the ruler of the brain. The balance of the narratives has been restored.
But it is just another narrative, isn't it? An incarnation of the age-old "good side" versus "bad side" story, only the sides have flipped now, right to left and left to right.
When we champion the "right hemisphere," for my part, I sense an undertone of rooting for the underdog, which is a mindset we often foster and embrace as therapists. Indeed, in our work with clients, we naturally support the underdog and root for David against Goliath. However, brain hemispheres are not actors in an age-old battle between good and evil. By adopting a romanticised view of this duality between the hemispheres, we risk doing a disservice to our clients—propagating an inaccurate narrative and proposing therapeutic interventions that might be based on myths and not science.
The science of the brain, and in this case, brain lateralisation, is, for better or worse, complex. While lateralisation is present for some functions of the brain (such as movement , vision and speech), it is becoming increasingly clear to me that the prevailing narrative of right brain/left brain is at best oversimplified, and more likely inaccurate.
Powerful stories are, well, powerful. We become emotionally attached to them. Maybe this is what happened with therapists and the right brain/left brain narrative. Maybe we simply fell in love with a good story.
But maybe we can try and go beyond the story, little by little? It is hard work, but speaking for myself, I know I really want to try. How about you?
Dr. Mike Trenter and myself will try to present some elements of this complex picture and provide you with some tools that might be able to help you make up your own mind on the question in our upcoming workshop.
For those of you who have a knack for attachment theory and lateralisation, you might want to check this myth-busting page(myth # 9).
As always, thank you for reading. For updates and more of the similar follow me on BlueSky or Twitter or subscribe to my mailing list.
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