From: goiss 1/05/00 21:29:26 Subject: Brain sides post id: 63277 I forgot: 1)which one is supposed to be the "creative" side of the brain and which one is the logical side?. 2) Was there some scientific evidence of females/males using more the one or the other? 3) What do we call the two sides? From: Ken 1/05/00 21:35:25 Subject: re: Brain sides post id: 63289 I think they are called the left and right hemispheres. From: Rapunzel 1/05/00 21:37:50 Subject: re: Brain sides post id: 63291 Left hemisphere usually more logical, right hemisphere usually more creative. Some people are actually laterally inverted, and it's the opposite for them. Women vs men? Well, women in fact make excellent use of both sides, given proper training. Men are slighly less sophisticated and a bit more unbalanced... ;-) Heeheehee! From: Grant¹ 1/05/00 21:42:14 Subject: re: Brain sides post id: 63295 According to one of the items on the Sleek Geek Week show, the part that coneects the 2 hemispheres (the name of which escapes me at present) is considerably larger in females than in males. From: Rapunzel 1/05/00 21:45:10 Subject: re: Brain sides post id: 63296 Yeah, well, that was to be expected! :-) It's called corpus callosum. You can have a look at one in some lamb brains from the supermarket. It's the white, squishy thing between the hemispheres. From: helen 2/05/00 10:12:57 Subject: re: Brain sides post id: 63509 Hi goiss, 1)which one is supposed to be the "creative" side of the brain and which one is the logical side?. think about what it takes to be creative - very simply, we could say it's about taking our own experiences and knowledge, and using them (or ignoring them :-)?) to come up with something new... or we could argue about it for an entire professional life, but let's not ;-). Now, think about what it takes to be logical - maybe we could say it's using those same experiences and knowledge to come up with rational solutions to problems. Creativity and logic are two seriously complex things. Given what we know about the functions of the two hemispheres, which is by no means complete, it's pretty safe to say that we use both sides of our brain for logic, and both sides of our brain for creativity :-). Rapunzel's right when she says that the left is supposed to be logical and the right creative, according to the same people who want to sell you expensive training courses on how to develop "the other side". However, you may want to check out a very good article from http://www.newscientist.com/ns/19990703/leftbrainr.html" New Scientist last year about the differences between the two hemispheres: There certainly are differences, but they seem to be more to do with processing style than with differences in function. How the two hemispheres work together is the important thing. 2) Was there some scientific evidence of females/males using more the one or the other? nope. Many studies have found differences between men's and women's verbal and maths/spatial abilities, which do roughly relate to the two hemispheres (a lot of language function is left-lateralised for most people, spatial ability right). Women tend to do better with language, men with things spatial. You need to remember two things though. One, this is a difference of averages, which means that there's a huge overlap between the two distributions of abilities: Put simply, many guys are better at language than many girls, and many girls are better at maths than many guys. Two, the difference may not be biological, or may only have a small biological component. Differences like these tend to be reinforced by culture. This forum is un-moderated. The views and opinions expressed are those of the individual poster and not the ABC. The ABC reserves the right to remove offensive or inappropriate messages.