Ready for the science? Good.  Three key insights are poised to help you understand how and when your hemispheres can best support your present and future pathways:

​

1. Your right brain holds the key to neuroplastic progress

​

Your brain is built for efficiency. It needs both default processes to use day-to-day and emerging processes when encountering and integrating new information. Here's how your brain accomplishes both:

 

To support efficient default operations, your brain maintains distinct maps, or networks, about its chief priorities and processes. These networks shape everything from your thoughts and beliefs to the nature of your lived experiences. The two largest—your Default Mode Network (DMN) and Salient Network (SN)—contain your brain's default priorities and are highly lateralized left (1). Your left brain stays fast and efficient by prioritizing connections within its own networks (2).

 

To ensure efficient awareness and integration of new and emerging information, your right brain works consistently with a broader scope of reference. It is constantly working to access and update global networks. Your brain's Central Executive Network (CEN) is mostly lateralized right(1) to help you evaluate and make decisions with the greatest possible scope of information. When your right brain sees or senses fresh information that is important for future reference, the right hemisphere comes alive with robust networking across the CEN, SN, and DMN. (1) The more meaningful the experience is to your brain's safety and threats, the more quickly its default networks will speed future retrieval. 

​

Inquiry: What if by consistently minding emerging safety cues, we can harness our right brain's bias for emergence and evolve the safety experience available in our default networks?

​​

(1) Causal Interactions between Froto-Parietal Central Executive and Default Mode Networks in Humans (via PubMed)

(2) Two Distinct Forms of Functional Lateralization in the Human Brain (via PNAS)

​

​

2. Your right brain is a powerhouse for imagination, future thinking and solutions

 

Now that we understand how the right brain integrates new information for neuroplastic progress, let’s explore its role in another critical function: imagination and future thinking.​

​

To navigate future situations effectively, we need to imagine scenarios and simulate outcomes. We also need the ability to reference these simulated experiences later on. These imagined and simulated scenarios recruit our brain's superpower for gestalt insights: the right brain. (Remember what we just learned about how involved this hemisphere is in whole-brain networking dynamics?)

 

Research consistently demonstrates that imagination—and specifically mental imagery—is highly lateralized right (3)(4)(5)(6), When measuring brain activity during imagination and future thinking, structures in the right cortex and right hippocampus are regularly identified to have stronger networking dynamics than the left (3). The right brain is so critical to the imagination that damage to this hemisphere directly correlates with difficulties in generating detailed future simulations (3). 

​

Now you know more about why  "a picture is worth a thousand words" when it comes to the brain's ability to access and gain insight from a wide array of connections.

​​

(3) The Hippocampus and Imagining the Future: Where Do We Stand? (via PubMed)

(4) The Right Hemisphere Maintains Solution-Related Activation for Yet-To-Be-Solved Problems (via PubMed)

(5) Hemispheric Asymmetry in Visual Mental Imagery (via PubMed)

(6) Lateralization of Brain Activation to Imagination... (via JCAT) 

​

3.  Your left brain is your powerhouse for narratives

​

For all the myths that abound about left and right brain function, neuroscientists do see two truths in the research: while our right brain excels at processing imagery—whether in our mind's eye or around us (2)(3)(4)(5)(6)(7)—our left hemisphere contributes more to language and speech (2)(7)(8).  In fact, groundbreaking new research from 2022 reveals how this is accomplished: input from the right brain is actively inhibited by the corpus callosum while the left hemisphere is constructing speech (8).  

​

Note: This emerging research into right-brain inhibition during speech processing is poised to offer increasingly valuable insight into applied savvy, so we'll be reporting any additional developments over the years!

​​

(1) Causal Interactions between Froto-Parietal Central Executive and Default Mode Networks in Humans (via PubMed)

(2) Two Distinct Forms of Functional Lateralization in the Human Brain (via PNAS)

(3) The Hippocampus and Imagining the Future: Where Do We Stand? (via PubMed)

(4) The Right Hemisphere Maintains Solution-Related Activation for Yet-To-Be-Solved Problems (via PubMed)

(5) Hemispheric Asymmetry in Visual Mental Imagery (via PubMed)

(6) Lateralization of Brain Activation to Imagination... (via JCAT) 

(7) An Evaluation of The Left Brain vs RIght Brain Hypothesis (via PLOS)

(8) Corpus Callosum Found to Switch off Right Hemisphere During Speech (via Neuroscience News)

​