Right vs. Left Brain

[00:00:00]
>> Sarah Drasner: So let's start off talking about right brain versus left brain. And you can see that before it says right brain versus left brain, there's a big orange thing that says myth. And the reason why it says myth is because it's not true. There are a bunch of resources here.

[00:00:16]
There's actually tons of resources out there that show that this is just not a real phenomenon, Harvard, Encyclopedia Britannica, a bunch of studies. The reason why this is so important is that people really convince themselves that they can't do something. People say, like, I'm in development, I can't design.

[00:00:36]
I'm a designer, I can't develop. We get put into these two camps and your brain doesn't work like that at all. There's no semblance that when you're good at one thing, that keeps you from being good at another. I commonly see developers actually bragging about how bad they are at design because they think it means that they’re better developers.

[00:00:56]
It doesn't, it just means they're bad at design [LAUGH]. Actually the more you use your brain, what these studies do show is, the more you use your brain in different types of ways, the stronger it becomes. It actually strengthens the corpus callosum. So there's this band in between the hemispheres and there are synapses that fire in different ways.

[00:01:18]
And the more you learn different types of things, you're able to make connections that other people can't make. So the more you learn outside of your own discipline, it's actually better for you as a developer as well. So some of the reason why this is important is because we kind of consider this for our personal limitations.

[00:01:38]
We are like, well, I just can't do that thing because I'm not set up that way. And that's not true. And if you think that you're not set up that way, chances are you won't be. Because you're gonna talk yourself out of it as well. So, this quote, there's no direct scientific evidence that supports an analytical logical thinking style for the left hemisphere, which predetermines the left hemisphere for mathematical tasks or reading and writing.

[00:02:02]
In contrast, I probably can't pronounce this name, Stanislas Dehaene found that both the right and left hemisphere are active in the identification of Arabic numerals. Similarly, other data showed subsystems in both hemispheres are activated for parts of the reading process. So basically what they're finding through using MRI scans, through CAT scans, through analyzing the brain is that all of these different areas of the brain are illuminated.