This brain image shows areas active during speech and language shaded in red. While language involves predominantly the left hemisphere of the brain in about 90 percent of people, it is not an exclusively left-brain function. Image courtesy of the University of Utah. 
 
 Left brain-right brain divide debunked at University of Utah 
 
 From corporate team-building activities to art instruction books, the concept that the different halves of the human brain govern different skills and personality traits is a popular mainstay. 
 
 Too bad it’s not true. 
 
 A new study from University of Utah neuroscientists uses brain imaging to debunk the idea that the left side of the brain controls logic and analytical thinking while the right side is responsible for creativity and thoughtfulness. 
 
 "It’s just one of those urban myths," said Jeff Anderson, a U. professor of radiology and lead author of the study published in the journal PLOS ONE online Thursday. 
 
 There is a grain of truth to it — the left side of the brain is more involved with language and the right evaluates the outside world, Anderson said. 
 
 But in an analysis of a database of resting brain scans of 1,011 people between the ages of 7 and 29, he and a team of researchers found no evidence of one side of the brain working alone more often, or people having a stronger neural network on one side over the other. 
 
 Though some connections are stronger than others, those tend to be localized rather than lateral. 
 
 Researchers used scans taken with functional connectivity MRI analysis, a sort of multi-dimensional brain imaging that takes a five to 10 minute scan of a person’s brain. It tells scientists not only what regions of the brain are in use but how they connect with each other. 
 
 "Certainly, there are personality differences. Some people are more analytical, other people might have more creative thought processes," Anderson said, "but they aren’t really using one side of the brain or the other." 
 
 The study emerged as part of Anderson’s work studying how brain wiring differs in people suffering from autism, Down syndrome and other disorders. 
 
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 lwhitehurst@sltrib.com 
 
 Twitter: @lwhitehurst ||||| Chances are, you've heard the label of being a "right-brained" or "left-brained" thinker. Logical, detail-oriented and analytical? That's left-brained behavior. Creative, thoughtful and subjective? Your brain's right side functions stronger -- or so long-held assumptions suggest. 
 
 But newly released research findings from University of Utah neuroscientists assert that there is no evidence within brain imaging that indicates some people are right-brained or left-brained. 
 
 For years in popular culture, the terms left-brained and right-brained have come to refer to personality types, with an assumption that some people use the right side of their brain more, while some use the left side more. 
 
 Following a two-year study, University of Utah researchers have debunked that myth through identifying specific networks in the left and right brain that process lateralized functions. Lateralization of brain function means that there are certain mental processes that are mainly specialized to one of the brain's left or right hemispheres. During the course of the study, researchers analyzed resting brain scans of 1,011 people between the ages of seven and 29. In each person, they studied functional lateralization of the brain measured for thousands of brain regions -- finding no relationship that individuals preferentially use their left -brain network or right- brain network more often. 
 
 "It's absolutely true that some brain functions occur in one or the other side of the brain. Language tends to be on the left, attention more on the right. But people don't tend to have a stronger left- or right-sided brain network. It seems to be determined more connection by connection, " said Jeff Anderson, M.D., Ph.D., lead author of the study, which is formally titled "An Evaluation of the Left-Brain vs. Right-Brain Hypothesis with Resting State Functional Connectivity Magnetic Resonance Imaging." It is published in the journal PLOS ONE this month. 
 
 Researchers obtained brain scans for the population they studied from a database called INDI, the International Neuroimaging Data-Sharing Initiative. The participants' scans were taken during a functional connectivity MRI analysis, meaning a participant laid in a scanner for 5 to 10 minutes while their resting brain activity was analyzed. 
 
 By viewing brain activity, scientists can correlate brain activity in one region of the brain compared to another. In the study, researchers broke up the brain into 7,000 regions and examined which regions of the brain were more lateralized. They looked for connections -- or all of the possible combinations of brain regions -- and added up the number of connections for each brain region that was left- lateralized or right-lateralized. They discovered patterns in brain imaging for why a brain connection might be strongly left- or right-lateralized, said Jared Nielsen, a graduate student in neuroscience who carried out the study as part of his coursework. 
 
 "If you have a connection that is strongly left- lateralized, it relates to other strongly lateralized connection only if both sets of connections have a brain region in common," said Nielsen. 
 
 Results of the study are groundbreaking, as they may change the way people think about the old right-brain versus left-brain theory, he said. 
 
 "Everyone should understand the personality types associated with the terminology 'left-brained' and 'right-brained' and how they relate to him or her personally; however, we just don't see patterns where the whole left-brain network is more connected or the whole right-brain network is more connected in some people. It may be that personality types have nothing to do with one hemisphere being more active, stronger, or more connected," said Nielsen. ||||| The idea that one side of the brain is dominant is a myth, researchers say. 
 
 It's the foundation of myriad personality assessment tests, self-motivation books and team-building exercises – and it's all bunk. 
 
 Popular culture would have you believe that logical, methodical and analytical people are left-brain dominant, while the creative and artistic types are right-brain dominant. Trouble is, science never really supported this notion. 
 
 Now, scientists at the University of Utah have debunked the myth with an analysis of more than 1,000 brains. They found no evidence that people preferentially use their left or right brain. All of the study participants — and no doubt the scientists — were using their entire brain equally, throughout the course of the experiment. 
 
 A paper describing this study appeared in August in the journal PLOS ONE. [10 Things You Didn't Know About the Brain] 
 
 The preference to use one brain region more than others for certain functions, which scientists call lateralization, is indeed real, said lead author Dr. Jeff Anderson, director of the fMRI Neurosurgical Mapping Service at the University of Utah. For example, speech emanates from the left side of the brain for most right-handed people. This does not imply, though, that great writers or speakers use their left side of the brain more than the right, or that one side is richer in neurons. 
 
 There is a misconception that everything to do with being analytical is confined to one side of the brain, and everything to do with being creative is confined to the opposite side, Anderson said. In fact, it is the connections among all brain regions that enable humans to engage in both creativity and analytical thinking. 
 
 "It is not the case that the left hemisphere is associated with logic or reasoning more than the right," Anderson told LiveScience. "Also, creativity is no more processed in the right hemisphere than the left." 
 
 Anderson's team examined brain scans of participants ages 7 to 29 while they were resting. They looked at activity in 7,000 brain regions, and examined neural connections within and between these regions. Although they saw pockets of heavy neural traffic in certain key regions, on average, both sides of the brain were essentially equal in their neural networks and connectivity. 
 
 "We just don't see patterns where the whole left-brain network is more connected, or the whole right-brain network is more connected in some people," said Jared Nielsen, a graduate student and first author on the new study. 
 
 The myth of people being either "left-brained" or "right-brained" might have arisen from the Nobel Prize-winning research of Roger Sperry, which was done in the 1960s. Sperry studied patients with epilepsy, who were treated with a surgical procedure that cut the brain along a structure called the corpus callosum. Because the corpus callosum connects the two hemispheres of the brain, the left and right sides of these patients' brains could no longer communicate. 
 
 Sperry and other researchers, through a series of clever studies, determined which parts, or sides, of the brain were involved in language, math, drawing and other functions in these patients. But then popular-level psychology enthusiasts ran with this idea, creating the notion that personalities and other human attributes are determined by having one side of the brain dominate the other. 
 
 The neuroscience community never bought into this notion, Anderson said, and now we have evidence from more than 1,000 brain scans showing absolutely no signs of left or right dominance. 
 
 Anderson said he wasn't out to do some myth busting. His team's goal is to better understand brain lateralization to treat conditions such as Down syndrome, autism or schizophrenia, where the left and right hemispheres have atypical roles. 
 
 So, should you trash your app that tries to determine if you are a left-brain or right-brain thinker? Both sides of your brain, as well as neuroscientists, say yes. 
 
 Christopher Wanjek is the author of a new novel, "Hey, Einstein!", a comical nature-versus-nurture tale about raising clones of Albert Einstein in less-than-ideal settings. His column, Bad Medicine, appears regularly on LiveScience.
– If you've long lauded your powerful right brain for providing you with your artistic prowess, some University of Utah researchers have bad news for you: The whole right-brain/left-brain thing isn't true. The neuroscientists analyzed 1,011 brain scans to come to their conclusion about whether people are indeed right-brain (ie, creative) or left-brain (ie, logical) dominant, and uncovered no proof that we actually use one side of our brain more heavily or have more robust neural connections there, reports the Salt Lake Tribune. To understand how the study worked, a quick science lesson/refresher: Lateralization is no myth, and refers to mental functions that largely rely on one side of the brain; for instance, speech is a mostly left-brain function, reports LiveScience. The scientists divided the brain into 7,000 regions and looked for connections. They counted the number of connections that could be described as left- or right-lateralized, and uncovered neither a preference for one side nor a stronger neural network on one side, reports Science Daily. "We just don't see patterns where the whole left-brain network is more connected, or the whole right-brain network is more connected in some people," says one of the study's authors. (Click to read about another surprising brain-related discovery.)