DL Ep. 33: The Left Brain / Right Brain Myth with Dr. Richie Davidson and Dr. Cortland Dahl

In this episode, Richie and Cort continue their conversation on brain asymmetry by revisiting one of the most popular neuroscience ideas of the 1990s: the divide between the “left brain” and the “right brain.” Was the right hemisphere really the creative side of the brain, and the left hemisphere the logical one? Richie explains where that idea came from, what it got right, and why it was taken too far. Along the way, he explores language, visual-spatial processing, the 200 million neurons connecting the hemispheres, and why real creativity may depend less on one side of the brain than on the coordination between both.

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This is the second part of our conversation on hemispheric specialization with Dr. Richard Davidson and Dr. Cortland Dahl. For the first part, see Your Brain Is a Storyteller, where we explore what split-brain research reveals about consciousness and emotion. For more on the popular science misreadings Richie warns about here, see our recent episode on Why dopamine isn't your problem. Dr. Richard Davidson is the William James and Vilas Research Professor of Psychology and Psychiatry at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and founder of the Center for Healthy Minds and the Healthy Minds App. His new book with Dr. Cortland Dahl, Born to Flourish, was published by Simon & Schuster in March 2026.

Podcast Chapter List

00:00:00 – Intro clip: Creativity requires both hemispheres00:01:30 – Welcome to Dharma Lab00:02:47 – Left brain/right brain ideas in popular culture00:04:00 – Where did these ideas come from?00:05:11 – Language, handedness, and hemisphere differences00:07:36 – The myth of the creative right brain00:08:50 – The 200 million neurons connecting both hemispheres00:10:38 – Split-brain patients and the corpus callosum00:11:57 – What surprised Richie in the early asymmetry research?00:13:10 – The resting brain data they almost threw away00:15:15 – Stable patterns in the resting brain00:16:04 – From “noise” to emotional style00:18:23 – The prefrontal cortex and emotion00:19:58 – Could you choose to use one side of the brain?00:21:52 – A grain of truth, taken too far00:22:55 – Sequential vs. parallel processing00:23:50 – Why real creativity requires both hemispheres00:24:51 – Interhemispheric coordination and creativity00:26:08 – Tibetan mudras and two-handed movement00:27:31 – Visualization, imagination, and creativity00:28:34 – Closing

Earlier Post on Brain Asymmetry (Part 1)

Written transcript for those who prefer to read

Lightly edited for clarity and readability.

Intro clip: Creativity requires both hemispheres

00:00

Richard Davidson:One of the things that’s true about language, and especially about speech, is that it’s sequential. We can’t say six words at the same time. Just can’t do it.

Cortland Dahl:I’m pretty sure my son could when he was really young, but in any case, it’s usually true.

Richard Davidson:Usually true. But if you have pictures of those six words — let’s say there are six animals and you present a picture — you can see all six at the same time.

That difference is what we call sequential versus parallel processing. There are certain kinds of visual-spatial skills that can be done more in parallel, and other kinds of skills and tasks that require more sequential activity.

And of course, real human creativity, I think, requires both.

This is why we have this massive fiber bundle that connects the two hemispheres together so they can work in an integrated way. I think it’s really an oversimplification to think that the right hemisphere is creative and the left is not.

Every human being has the potential to be creative. When humans are the most creative, we’re harnessing the full capabilities of our brain. It’s not just the right hemisphere or the left hemisphere. It’s both.

Welcome to Dharma Lab

00:01:30

Cortland Dahl:Hello everyone. Welcome back to another episode of Dharma Lab. I’m Cortland Dahl. I’m here with Dr. Richard Davidson, who we all affectionately call Richie, one of the great living neuroscientists on the planet.

Today we’re going to continue a discussion we’ve had previously about some of Richie’s most important early work.

Richie, I’m excited to ask you about this, partly because I myself have always wanted to geek out and hear more about these things. We always have a million things to talk about, but I never get to talk to you about this.

In a previous episode, we talked about your very early research when you were just at Harvard, coming out of grad school, and your early work that showed differences between the different hemispheres of the brain — what is most simply referred to as asymmetry between these different hemispheres.

We talked a lot about that, and we can put a link to that previous discussion.

Left brain/right brain ideas in popular culture

00:02:47

This was back in the late seventies and into the eighties. Then something very interesting happened in the nineties.

I graduated from high school in 1992 and was just starting college. There was a book at that time, and there was all sorts of stuff in the popular media about asymmetry, although that word probably wasn’t used. I remember a lot of things about the left side and right side of the brain.

There was a book that I think was something like Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain. It was pointing, in many ways, to your work, which you were very much at the forefront of and had been for many years at that point.

But I imagine, like many things, there was probably a lot of oversimplification and perhaps even misunderstanding about what the science really says and what’s really going on in the brain.

So maybe we could start there, going back to this discussion about asymmetry and what your research and other researchers were really finding about the different hemispheres of the brain — and how that relates to things like creativity, being more logical, and all the stuff that was at work in our popular conversations about the brain at that time.

Where did these ideas come from?

00:04:00

Richard Davidson:Thank you for that great introduction. There’s so much to say. Just being primed with that brings back intense memories from that period. I was very much living this.

I published more than 100 papers on brain asymmetry in one way or another, and edited two books on brain asymmetry that were published by MIT Press. They were major compendiums at the time, with a scientist in Norway named Kenneth Hugdahl, one of my early collaborators.

So yes, there’s so much to say.

Let’s begin by asking where these ideas may have come from.

In the previous episode of Dharma Lab, where we began to introduce this topic, one of the things we talked about is that the left hemisphere can speak and has language much more so than the right hemisphere — at least in most people.

Language, handedness, and hemisphere differences

00:05:11

I should say that these broad generalizations about the left and right hemisphere are roughly true for right-handed people only. They are not necessarily true for people who write with their left hand.

That itself is a whole topic of really interesting conversation, and we’ll bracket it. We can come back to it today briefly. But for now — and I apologize to all you lefties out there — since the majority of people are right-handed, roughly 85%, we’ll just stick with that for now.

One of the questions scientists posed is this: if the left hemisphere can speak and really is the primary province of language, what is the right hemisphere doing?

It’s presumably not just an appendage. It’s not just there to structurally latch on to the left hemisphere and hold it in place. It has to be doing something.

Does it have some specialized role? If the left hemisphere is specialized more for language, is there some set of functions for which the right hemisphere may be better than the left hemisphere?

Sci…

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