http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/10/23/right-versus-left-brain-what-does-the-spinning-dancer-teach-us/
October 23, 2007, 9:43 am
Right Versus Left Brain: What Does the Spinning Dancer Teach Us?
By Steven D. Levitt
Last week I linked to an intriguing visual of a spinning dancer. It is intriguing because some people see her spinning clockwise, whereas others see her spinning counter-clockwise. Moreover, some people are able to make the direction of her spin switch. The article asserts that the direction she spins is an indicator of whether your thinking is dominated by the right side of your brain (clockwise) or the left side of your brain (counter-clockwise).
According to funderstanding.com, left-brain people are supposed to be logical, sequential, rational, analytical, objective, and look at parts. These folks should see her spinning counter-clockwise. Right-brain people, meanwhile, are supposed to be random, intuitive, holistic, synthesizing, subjective, and look at wholes. She should spin clockwise in this case.
For me, the spinning is decidedly clockwise, which presumably makes me right-brained. I guess my college roommates, who nicknamed me “The Rational Man,” would be surprised and disappointed by the spinning dancer’s verdict. My wife Jeannette, watching the dancer next to me, saw her spin counter-clockwise. (As a result, her new nickname is “The Rational Woman,” though I don’t think it will stick.)
My initial sample of two people (my wife and myself) did not seem to fit with these predictions. So, in the interest of collecting more data, I asked blog readers to list their college majors along with the dancer’s spinning direction. We then tallied the data for the first 219 respondents who provided usable data. We divided people into the following broad categories based on their college majors: economics, hard sciences, engineering/math/computer science, non-economics social scientists, and the humanities.
The theory, I think, would predict that economists, engineers, and scientists would likely be dominated by left-brain thinkers who see her spinning counter-clockwise, whereas humanists and non-economics social scientists would have more right-brain thinkers. Here’s how the numbers actually break down as to who initially sees her spinning counter-clockwise among Freakonomics blog readers. The higher this number, the more rational you are supposed to be (with the number of observations in parentheses):
Engineers/mathematicians/computer programmers: 21.8% (N=55)
Economists: 26.7% (N=60)
Scientists: 31.0% (N=29)
Social Scientists: 36.2% (N=47)
Humanities: 42.9% (N=28)
Admittedly, these are not large sample sizes, but the results could hardly be more off from the theory’s apparent predictions. Ironically, it appears that the theory does have some power to order people as to how logical they might be — you just have to reverse your interpretation of which direction of spin corresponds to right-brained thinking. Perhaps the author of the article just got confused?
The initial article also misses on its other prediction — namely, that the dancer will spin counter-clockwise for most people. In fact, in our data only 30 percent of the people saw her spinning counter-clockwise when they first looked. Again, this is consistent with the original author mixing up clockwise and counter-clockwise.
As it turns out, I should have asked our commenters to list their genders as well. In most cases, we could make an informed guess of gender based on names. Women turned out to be 36 percent counter-clockwise, versus 30 percent for men (and 23 percent for people whose gender we couldn’t tell from their comment). From a cursory search of the Internet, it seems like this result also contradicts what we would expect.
I often joke about how the information provided by someone who is incredibly terrible at predicting the future (i.e., they always get things wrong) is just as valuable as what you get from someone who is good at predicting the future. I used this strategy with some success by betting the opposite of my father whenever he’d bet a large sum of money on a football team that was sure to cover the spread.
It looks like the spinning dancer is just terrible enough as a predictor to be of value.
Tags: data analysis, Gender, predictions
Showing posts with label Right Brain. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Right Brain. Show all posts
Tuesday, November 4, 2008
Does the “Right Brain vs. Left Brain” Test Work?
http://scienceline.org/2007/10/29/ask-hsu-spinning-girl-right-left-brain-hemispheres/
Does the “Right Brain vs. Left Brain” Spinning Dancer Test Work?
- asks Aki from San Francisco
By Jeremy Hsu, posted October 29th, 2007.
A new “brain test” floating around online shows a spinning dancer and asks whether you see the image rotating clockwise or counterclockwise. If it spins clockwise, you supposedly use more of your right brain. Counterclockwise, and you’re more of a left brain person. The test then lists functions associated with each side of the brain – the left side includes “uses logic” and “facts rule,” while the right side includes “uses feeling” and “imagination rules.”
A good friend complained that the test told her she was a left brain person, even when she knew herself to not be into left brain associations such as “math and science.” A similar discrepancy was discerned by one of the authors of the Freakonomics blog, when he conducted a quick, nonscientific survey of blog readers, which cross referenced college majors and spinning dancer test results.
If the test sounds flawed, that’s not just because one shouldn’t use spinning dancers to characterize their brain strengths. Rather, the test is coming up inaccurate because it provides a crude view of the “lateralization of brain function,” or the concept that each side of the human brain specializes in certain mental activities.
The concept was born in the 1960s, when Roger Sperry studied epilepsy patients who had had a nerve connection between their hemispheres surgically cut. He found that the left brain hemisphere seemed to possess “speech and a rational, intellectual style,” while the right side was “inarticulate, but blessed with special spatial abilities.”
Modern neuroscience studies using brain imaging technology such as fMRI – which shows active areas of the brain while a person is trying to perform a task – have further suggested that language ability tends to be localized in the left hemisphere, while spatial ability tends to be in the right hemisphere.
However, neuroscience-minded blogs like Neurophilosophy point out that doing any complex mental activity requires cooperation from both sides of the brain, although certain processing tasks required for that activity may be concentrated on one side or the other. In other words, saying that “math and science are left brain functions” is an over-generalized statement.
“It’s not that you have a special math module somewhere in your brain, but rather that the brain’s particular functional organization…predisposes it towards the use of high-level imagery and spatial skills, which in turn just happen to be very useful when it comes to doing math reasoning,” said Michael O’Boyle, a psychologist at the University of Melbourne, Australia, in a public statement through the American Psychological Association.
In fact, the best math students don’t even seem to settle for being “left brain” people. A study undertaken by O’Boyle found mathematically gifted students did better than average students on tests that required both halves of the brain to cooperate. This demonstrated that, while the typical person might lean more heavily on one hemisphere or the other to do mental tasks necessary for math calculation, the brightest among us can more fully integrate both hemispheres of the brain.
The idea that emotion processing only occurs in the right brain hemisphere and fact processing in the left is also misleading. Brain imaging studies have showed that people processed emotion using small parts of both brain hemispheres.
“The popular notion of an ‘emotional’ right hemisphere that contrasts sharply with a ‘rational’ left hemisphere is like a crude pencil sketch made before a full-color painting,” noted a 2005 Scientific American Mind article.
Believing in left brain or right brain people also fails to account for the human brain’s mysterious flexibility and plasticity. People who had half their brain removed encounter some problems – like not being able to move or see from one side of their body – but largely retained or relearned mental abilities such as language in their remaining brain hemisphere. All this research clearly points out that while Nobel winner Sperry was onto something with his lateralization research, trying to fully compartmentalize mental activity by brain hemisphere is imprecise.
So what does the spinning dancer tell us? The whole test is more of an optical illusion than anything else, according to Steven Novella, an academic clinical neurologist at Yale University School of Medicine who blogs on NeuroLogica. When our brains process visual images to make some order or sense of the world, they have to make assumptions. The dancer is just a two dimensional image switching back and forth, but our brains process it as a three dimensional spinning object.
Depending on the assumptions made and visual cues picked up, your brain can make the dancer spin either way. When my friend first sent the test to me, I saw it go clockwise…then switch to counterclockwise as I was staring at the screen. What this tells me about my personality and mental abilities is hardly a no-brainer – the brain test connection to our mental strengths and weaknesses is nonexistent.
Does the “Right Brain vs. Left Brain” Spinning Dancer Test Work?
- asks Aki from San Francisco
By Jeremy Hsu, posted October 29th, 2007.
A new “brain test” floating around online shows a spinning dancer and asks whether you see the image rotating clockwise or counterclockwise. If it spins clockwise, you supposedly use more of your right brain. Counterclockwise, and you’re more of a left brain person. The test then lists functions associated with each side of the brain – the left side includes “uses logic” and “facts rule,” while the right side includes “uses feeling” and “imagination rules.”
A good friend complained that the test told her she was a left brain person, even when she knew herself to not be into left brain associations such as “math and science.” A similar discrepancy was discerned by one of the authors of the Freakonomics blog, when he conducted a quick, nonscientific survey of blog readers, which cross referenced college majors and spinning dancer test results.
If the test sounds flawed, that’s not just because one shouldn’t use spinning dancers to characterize their brain strengths. Rather, the test is coming up inaccurate because it provides a crude view of the “lateralization of brain function,” or the concept that each side of the human brain specializes in certain mental activities.
The concept was born in the 1960s, when Roger Sperry studied epilepsy patients who had had a nerve connection between their hemispheres surgically cut. He found that the left brain hemisphere seemed to possess “speech and a rational, intellectual style,” while the right side was “inarticulate, but blessed with special spatial abilities.”
Modern neuroscience studies using brain imaging technology such as fMRI – which shows active areas of the brain while a person is trying to perform a task – have further suggested that language ability tends to be localized in the left hemisphere, while spatial ability tends to be in the right hemisphere.
However, neuroscience-minded blogs like Neurophilosophy point out that doing any complex mental activity requires cooperation from both sides of the brain, although certain processing tasks required for that activity may be concentrated on one side or the other. In other words, saying that “math and science are left brain functions” is an over-generalized statement.
“It’s not that you have a special math module somewhere in your brain, but rather that the brain’s particular functional organization…predisposes it towards the use of high-level imagery and spatial skills, which in turn just happen to be very useful when it comes to doing math reasoning,” said Michael O’Boyle, a psychologist at the University of Melbourne, Australia, in a public statement through the American Psychological Association.
In fact, the best math students don’t even seem to settle for being “left brain” people. A study undertaken by O’Boyle found mathematically gifted students did better than average students on tests that required both halves of the brain to cooperate. This demonstrated that, while the typical person might lean more heavily on one hemisphere or the other to do mental tasks necessary for math calculation, the brightest among us can more fully integrate both hemispheres of the brain.
The idea that emotion processing only occurs in the right brain hemisphere and fact processing in the left is also misleading. Brain imaging studies have showed that people processed emotion using small parts of both brain hemispheres.
“The popular notion of an ‘emotional’ right hemisphere that contrasts sharply with a ‘rational’ left hemisphere is like a crude pencil sketch made before a full-color painting,” noted a 2005 Scientific American Mind article.
Believing in left brain or right brain people also fails to account for the human brain’s mysterious flexibility and plasticity. People who had half their brain removed encounter some problems – like not being able to move or see from one side of their body – but largely retained or relearned mental abilities such as language in their remaining brain hemisphere. All this research clearly points out that while Nobel winner Sperry was onto something with his lateralization research, trying to fully compartmentalize mental activity by brain hemisphere is imprecise.
So what does the spinning dancer tell us? The whole test is more of an optical illusion than anything else, according to Steven Novella, an academic clinical neurologist at Yale University School of Medicine who blogs on NeuroLogica. When our brains process visual images to make some order or sense of the world, they have to make assumptions. The dancer is just a two dimensional image switching back and forth, but our brains process it as a three dimensional spinning object.
Depending on the assumptions made and visual cues picked up, your brain can make the dancer spin either way. When my friend first sent the test to me, I saw it go clockwise…then switch to counterclockwise as I was staring at the screen. What this tells me about my personality and mental abilities is hardly a no-brainer – the brain test connection to our mental strengths and weaknesses is nonexistent.
The Right Brain vs Left Brain test
Go to the URL to see the Dancer GIF:
http://www.news.com.au/perthnow/story/0,21598,22492511-5005375,00.html
September 26, 2007
The Right Brain vs Left Brain test ... do you see the dancer turning clockwise or anti-clockwise?
If clockwise, then you use more of the right side of the brain and vice versa.
Most of us would see the dancer turning anti-clockwise though you can try to focus and change the direction; see if you can do it.
LEFT BRAIN FUNCTIONS
uses logic
detail oriented
facts rule
words and language
present and past
math and science
can comprehend
knowing
acknowledges
order/pattern perception
knows object name
reality based
forms strategies
practical
safe
RIGHT BRAIN FUNCTIONS
uses feeling
"big picture" oriented
imagination rules
symbols and images
present and future
philosophy & religion
can "get it" (i.e. meaning)
believes
appreciates
spatial perception
knows object function
fantasy based
presents possibilities
impetuous
risk taking
http://www.news.com.au/perthnow/story/0,21598,22492511-5005375,00.html
September 26, 2007
The Right Brain vs Left Brain test ... do you see the dancer turning clockwise or anti-clockwise?
If clockwise, then you use more of the right side of the brain and vice versa.
Most of us would see the dancer turning anti-clockwise though you can try to focus and change the direction; see if you can do it.
LEFT BRAIN FUNCTIONS
uses logic
detail oriented
facts rule
words and language
present and past
math and science
can comprehend
knowing
acknowledges
order/pattern perception
knows object name
reality based
forms strategies
practical
safe
RIGHT BRAIN FUNCTIONS
uses feeling
"big picture" oriented
imagination rules
symbols and images
present and future
philosophy & religion
can "get it" (i.e. meaning)
believes
appreciates
spatial perception
knows object function
fantasy based
presents possibilities
impetuous
risk taking
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
Posts
