Science Forums 2

[CraigD]

Originally Posted by questor

In my social encounters with R-brainers, I have perceived certain traits…

Questor, what is your criteria for determining that a person you encounter socially is an “R-brainer”? What technique, if any, have you used to measure or obtain measurements of the actual brain activity of people on whom you’ve applied this criteria, to validate it’s accuracy?

Please refer to an accepted encyclopedic article on the subject of right and left-brainedness, such as the previously linked-to wikipedia article “Lateralization of brain function”, especially the cautions concerning “pseudoscientific exaggerations”. If you disagree with these articles, please state so.

I fear that you are a victim of popular pseudoscience equating brain development and anatomy with behavior, and using poorly controlled, anecdotal “statistics” to support these claims. Historically, such misguidance has had very dire social consequences – a well-know example is the pseudoscientific theory of Phrenology. Influential in the 19th centuries, it became notorious when it was revived by Nazi scientists in the 1940s to support claims of racial superiority and inferiority instrumental in the Holocaust.

The idea that a well-known self-identifying terms, such as “liberal” and “conservative”, can be mapped to measurable anatomical and physiological traits is an intriguing one, but without the support of objective scientific experiments, such speculation is baseless.