This is hidden brain.
I'm Shankar Vedantam.
If you type in the words left brain versus right brain on YouTube, it's not long before you'll find yourself in a vortex of weird claims and outlandish hype.
With the left brain imbalance, the overall function of the brain is stunted, so that the oldest part of the brain, the reptile brain, takes over on an instinctual level.
Men.
Men need formulas.
We need systems.
That's the left brain, by the way.
For men is that most people are either exclusively left brained or right brained.
They're one or the other.
For decades, pop psychology books and plenty of YouTube videos have made dramatic claims about people who are left brained and people who are right brained.
It got to the point that respectable scientists felt they had to steer clear of the study of hemispheric differences.
I was told when I got involved in this area, don't touch it.
It's toxic.
Don't even go there.
This week on hidden brain, we follow the work of a researcher who went there.
What he's found is much more nuanced and complex than the story on YouTube.
His conclusions, though, might be even more dramatic.
He argues that differences in the brain and western society's preference for what one hemisphere has to offer have had enormous effects on our lives.
Ian McGilchrist is a psychiatrist.