We hear a lot about whether we are “left-brain” or
“right-brain” people depending on our occupations and other activities. The
cool analytical thinkers among us are the left-brainers while the artistic,
creative types are the right-brainers. Of course, some of the time we make
fools of ourselves and we could call ourselves “no-brainers”, or at least we
feel like that, usually when we are battling in vain with some new software
update.
The Guardian Improbable column (1) drew my attention to a paper published
last December by Cope et al in the Frontiers of Evolutionary Neuroscience in
which they come up with the answer to an unexpected question, namely “what half
of the brain do we reserve for processing immoral stimuli?”
My prejudices immediately went into overdrive, but
of course, have zero validity when there are systematic experiments to pore
over. They carried out three studies. The first two were based on reading
statements with their heads in the big magnet and the third had pictures. Now not
all the statements or picture were of immoral acts; some were neutral or there
wouldn’t have been a benchmark.
In the first experiment, they had fifty 25-year old
guys who were shown statements about them doing things with their sisters.
These ranged from bad (like incest and murder) through gross to harmless. The
second set had twenty-three 30-something men and women who had to judge whether
the acts described were wrong or not. These covered a wider range of the type
of issues that exercise many people in society currently. The picture group
were back to the 25-year old age band, but were both men and women. The
“naughty” things here did not include sexual immorality, but rather drinking
and driving, house breaking and the like.
Well, they got a lot of colorful pictures and we
very clearly just work with one hemisphere when we’re making judgments on other
peoples moral behavior. Which side do I hear you ask? The left hemisphere is
the one when we are making those snap character assessments of what that couple
is doing in the back row of the movies.
Not surprising really I suppose as we are bringing
our cold analytical judgment to bear. However, I’m left with wanting more. Which
hemisphere are you exercising when you are practicing that immoral sexual licentiousness, drinking and driving, or maybe house breaking?
Maybe we’ll never know. It’s hard to indulge in
those activities whilst wearing a large magnet.
- http://www.improbable.com/
- Cope et al, Frontiers in Evolutionary Neuroscience, (2010) doi:10.3389/fnevo.2010.00110
