Am I Right-Brained Dominant?

I’ve found that people either oversimplify their attempts to figure out this question, or get bogged down into the nitty-gritty details of testing scores. In the first camp, one can find a lot of “tests” on-line that determine brain dominance. There’s the simplistic version of “which direction is the dancer moving,” which is explained as an optical illusion. In this same genre, you have all the myriad of tests that you answer questions in order to determine brain dominance.  As confessed in this blog, our cultural conditioning often play into our answers in these types of tests,  which invalidates the attempt to determine brain dominance in this manner.

In the second, more common, camp, are those who feel that certain test scores compared to other test scores indicate particular strengths or weaknesses. In her popular (out-of-print) book, Upside-Down Brilliance: The Visual-Spatial Learner, Linda Kreger-Silverman has spent much of her career conducting tests and persistently trying to create a measuring tool that will accurately determine the visual-spatial (her name for right-brained dominance) identification. And yet, she concludes, “While the analysis of subtest patterns tells me a great deal about visual-spatial learners, most of the time I rely on the children’s interests. They seem to be more reliable than any particular constellation of subtest scores.”

What I’ve come to discover as I’ve helped others understand the traits and  learning path of right-brained dominant children is that it’s actually rather straightforward to know if you’re right-brained dominant.

Do you exhibit the two universal gifts of a right-brained learner?

Do you enjoy engaging in one or more of the creative outlets?

The two universal gifts for right-brained learners are a highly developed imagination, and the ability to think in pictures. The creative outlets are computers/video games, art/photography, puzzles/mazes, fashion/sewing, building/electronics, theater/showmanship, math/numbers, music/dance, and cooking/gardening. Simple enough to determine without the gimmicks, and yet concrete enough to recognize without the complicated data.

In order to explain the universal gifts more thoroughly, you can read Chapter Five of my book, The Right Side of Normal, here. Chapter Six goes into the creative outlets, but I think you get the general idea from the list above.

I want to end with the clarification I make at the beginning of my book:

Although controversy continues regarding the labeling of people as left-brained or right-brained, I have noticed, as have many experts (see Chapter Two), an easily recognizable pattern of learning and temperament traits that frequently go together. For instance, when I describe these traits (see Section Two) at conferences, I see whole audiences nodding in recognition. Inevitably, various individuals approach me and say, “You described my child to a tee” or “Have you been looking in our window?” This can’t be coincidence. Whether proven by current studies or not, there’s ample anecdotal evidence that supports there are time frame, temperament, and gift/strength differences based on brain processing preferences.

Being left- or right-brained dominant doesn’t mean we only use half our brain. Billions of bits of information per second can travel along the nerves that connect the two hemispheres, so naturally there’s communication between the hemispheres. I’m simply talking about the brain processing preferences that each of us is biologically born to favor. With those preferences come the traits that stem from the specialization found in the left or right side of the brain.

Have fun discovering the joys, the gifts, and the strengths of being right-brained!

Question: What right-brained trait do you recognize clearest in yourself or your child?

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