[tooblue]

Originally Posted by SoonerCoug

Right-brained versus left-brained is an interesting issue.

I think there are actually very few *truly* right-brained people in the world. I'm sure MW knows more about this than I do.

My understanding is that "left brained" is medically defined primarily by location of the speech centers in the brain, and that the ability to speak and understand language is almost always located in the left brain.

There are analogous regions on the right side of the brain that allow someone to speak with emotion and understand emotion during speech.

So if a person has a lesion in the speech center on the left side of the brain, then they would not be able to speak at all. If a person has a lesion in the analogous location on the right side of the brain, they would not be able to speak with any emotion. The same goes for understanding words, versus understanding emotion in words (different area, but same hemisphere as the speech center).

So being truly right brained is much more rare, if the definition is: the speech centers are found on the right side of the brain and the emotion-related center is on the left side.

Here's a quote from wikipedia (sorry BG, but you're not even here, so I don't care): "While 95% of right handers have their language functions in the left hemisphere, only 18.8% of left-handers have their language function lateralized in the right hemisphere. Additionally, 19.8% of left-handers even have bilateral language functions."

I thought it was even more rare to be truly "right brained" than wikipedia claims.

Another article on this very issue:

http://www.newscientist.com/article/...ght-brain.html