People are 'left-brained' (logical) or 'right-brained' (creative).
Verdict: refuted
Brain imaging shows no dominant hemisphere that defines personality; both sides work together.
What the evidence shows
It is true that some functions are lateralised — language leans left, some spatial attention leans right. The popular leap is that individuals have a dominant hemisphere that makes them either analytical or artistic. That is a different, much stronger claim.
Nielsen and colleagues (2013) analysed resting-state brain scans of over 1,000 people and looked for individuals whose whole left or right network was systematically stronger. They found none: people used both hemispheres roughly equally, and no one had a globally 'dominant' side that would justify a left/right personality type. Specific tasks recruit specific regions on both sides, but the tidy logical-vs-creative dichotomy is a myth.
Sources
Nielsen, J. A., Zielinski, B. A., Ferguson, M. A., Lainhart, J. E., & Anderson, J. S. (2013). An evaluation of the left-brain vs. right-brain hypothesis with resting state functional connectivity magnetic resonance imaging.
PLOS ONE, 8(8), e71275
In over 1,000 brains, no individuals showed a globally stronger left or right hemispheric network — undercutting the idea of a dominant-hemisphere personality.
DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0071275 →