Setting the gears in motion

A couple of weeks ago, I was out for a run on a local trail, and I almost stepped on a snake.

Fortunately, here in upstate New York, we don't have any poisonous snakes.  Unlike in my home state of Louisiana, where going for a trail run is taking your life into your hands.  It was just a garter snake, common and completely harmless, but it startled the hell out of me even though I like snakes.  What's interesting, though, is that in mid-stride I did a sudden course correction without even being consciously aware of it, put my foot down well to the snake's left (fortunately for it), and kept going with barely a stumble.  I was another three paces ahead when my conscious brain caught up and said, "Holy shit, I almost stepped on a snake!"

Thanks for the lightning-fast assessment of the situation, conscious brain.

It's kind of amazing how fast we can do these sorts of adjustments, and some recent research at the University of Michigan suggests that we do them better while running -- and more interesting still, we get better at it the faster we run.

Running apparently triggers a rapid interchange of information between the right and left sides of the brain.  It makes sense; when you run, the two sides of your body (and thus the two sides of your brain) have to coordinate precisely.  Or at least they have to if you're trying to run well.  I've seen runners who look like they're being controlled by a team of aliens who only recently learned how the human body works, and still aren't very good at it.  "Okay, move left leg forward... and move the right arm back at the same time!... No, I mean forward!  Okay, now right leg backward... um... wait..."  *crash*  "Dammit, get him up off the ground and try it again, and do it right this time!"

But to run efficiently requires that you coordinate the entire body, and do it fast.  (In fact, a 2014 study found that a proper arm swing rhythm during running creates a measurable improvement in efficiency.)  The University of Michigan study that was published this week identified a particular kind of neural cross-talk between the two brain hemispheres when you run.  They call these patterns "splines" (because they look like the interlocking teeth of a gear wheel) and found that the faster you run, the more intense the splines get.

"Previously identified brain rhythms are akin to the left brain and right brain participating in synchronized swimming: The two halves of the brain try to do the same thing at the exact same time," said Omar Ahmed, who led the study.  "Spline rhythms, on the other hand, are like the left and right brains playing a game of very fast—and very precise—pingpong.  This back-and-forth game of neural pingpong represents a fundamentally different way for the left brain and right brain to talk to each other."

Me and some other folks at a race last month, splining like hell

"These spline brain rhythms are faster than all other healthy, awake brain rhythms," said Megha Ghosh, who co-authored the paper.  "Splines also get stronger and even more precise when running faster.  This is likely to help the left brain and right brain compute more cohesively and rapidly when an animal is moving faster and needs to make faster decisions."

More fascinating still is that the researchers found spline rhythms during one other activity: dreaming during the REM (rapid eye movement) stage of sleep.  So this could be yet another function of dreams -- rehearsing the coordinating rhythms between the two brain hemispheres, so that the pathways are well established when you need them while you're awake.  

"Surprisingly, this back-and-forth communication is even stronger during dream-like sleep than it is when animals are awake and running," Ahmed said.  "This means that splines play a critical role in coordinating information during sleep, perhaps helping to solidify awake experiences into enhanced long-term memories during this dream-like state."

So that's the latest news from the intersection of two of my obsessions, neuroscience and running.  It'll give me something to think about in a few minutes when I go out for my morning run.  Maybe it'll distract me from obsessively scanning the trail for snakes.

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In your right mind

There's a peculiarity of the human brain called lateralization, which is the tendency of the brain to have a dominant side.  It's most clearly reflected in hand dominance; because of the cross-wiring of the brain, people who are right-handed have a tendency to be left brain dominant, and vice versa.  (There's more to it than that, as some people who are right handed are, for example, left eye dominant, but handedness is the most familiar manifestation of brain lateralization.)

It bears mention at this juncture that the common folk wisdom that brain lateralization has an influence on your personality -- that, for instance, left brain dominant people are sequential, mathematical, and logical, and right brain dominant people are creative, artistic, and holistic -- is complete nonsense.  That myth has been around for a long while, and has been roundly debunked, but still persists for some reason.

I first was introduced to the concept of brain dominance when I was in eighth grade.  I was having some difficulty reading, and my English teacher, Mrs. Gates, told me she thought I was mixed-brain dominant -- that I didn't have a strongly lateralized brain -- and that this often leads to processing disorders like dyslexia.  (She was right, but they still don't know why that connection exists.)  It made sense.  When I was in kindergarten, I switched back and forth between writing with my right and left hand about five times until my teacher got fed up and told me to simmer down and pick one.  I picked my right hand, and have stuck with it ever since, but I still have a lot of lefty characteristics.  I tend to pick up a drinking glass with my left hand, and I'm strongly left eye dominant, for example.

Anyhow, Mrs. Gates identified my mixed-brainness, and the outcome apropos of my reading facility, but she also told me that there was one thing that mixed-brain people can learn faster than anyone else.  Because of our nearly-equal control from both sides of the brain, we can do a cool thing, which Mrs. Gates taught me and I learned in fifteen seconds flat.  I can write, in cursive, forward with my right hand while I'm writing the same thing backwards with my left.  (Because it's me, they're both pretty illegible, but it's still kind of a fun party trick.)

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Evan-Amos, Human-Hands-Front-Back, CC BY-SA 3.0]

Fast forward to today.  It's been known for years that lots of animals are lateralized, so it stands to reason that it must confer some kind of evolutionary advantage, but what that might be was unclear until recently.

Research by a team led by Onur Güntürkün, of the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience at Ruhr-University Bochum, in Germany, has looked at lateralization in animals from cockatoos to zebra fish to humans, and has described the possible evolutionary rationale for having a dominant side of the brain.

"What you do with your hands is a miracle of biological evolution," Güntürkün says. " We are the master of our hands, and by funneling this training to one hemisphere of our brains, we can become more proficient at that kind of dexterity.  Natural selection likely provided an advantage that resulted in a proportion of the population -- about 10% -- favoring the opposite hand.  The thing that connects the two is parallel processing, which enables us to do two things that use different parts of the brain at the same time."

Additionally, Güntürkün says, our perceptual systems have also evolved that kind of division of labor.  Both left and right brain have visual recognition centers, but in humans the one on the right side is more devoted to image recognition, and the one on the left to word and symbol recognition.  And this is apparently a very old evolutionary innovation, long predating our use of language; even pigeons have a split perceptual function between the two sides of the brain (and therefore between their eyes).  They tend to tilt their heads so their left eye is scanning the ground for food while their right one scans the sky for predators.

So what might seem to be a bad idea -- ceding more control to one side of the brain than the other, making one hand more nimble than the other --turns out to have a distinct advantage.  And if you'll indulge me in a little bit of linguistics geekery, for good measure, even our word "dexterous" reflects this phenomenon.  "Dexter" is Latin for "right," and reflects the commonness of right-handers, who were considered to be more skillful.  (And when you find out that the Latin word for "left" is "sinister," you get a rather unfortunate lens into attitudes toward southpaws.)

Anyhow, there you have it; another interesting feature of our brain physiology explained, and one that has a lot of potential for increasing our understanding of neural development.  "Studying asymmetry can provide the most basic blueprints for how the brain is organized," Güntürkün says.  "It gives us an unprecedented window into the wiring of the early, developing brain that ultimately determines the fate of the adult brain.  Because asymmetry is not limited to human brains, a number of animal models have emerged that can help unravel both the genetic and epigenetic foundations for the phenomenon of lateralization."

***************************************

I've always been in awe of cryptographers.  I love puzzles, but code decipherment has seemed to me to be a little like magic.  I've read about such feats as the breaking of the "Enigma" code during World War II by a team led by British computer scientist Alan Turing, and the stunning decipherment of Linear B -- a writing system for which (at first) we knew neither the sound-to-symbol correspondence nor even the language it represented -- by Alice Kober and Michael Ventris.

My reaction each time has been, "I am not nearly smart enough to figure something like this out."

Possibly because it's so unfathomable to me, I've been fascinated with tales of codebreaking ever since I can remember.  This is why I was thrilled to read Simon Singh's The Code Book: The Science of Secrecy from Ancient Egypt to Quantum Cryptography, which describes some of the most amazing examples of people's attempts to design codes that were uncrackable -- and the ones who were able to crack them.

If you're at all interested in the science of covert communications, or just like to read about fascinating achievements by incredibly talented people, you definitely need to read The Code Book.  Even after I finished it, I still know I'm not smart enough to decipher complex codes, but it sure is fun to read about how others have accomplished it.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

Color commentary

The "what colors do you see in this photograph?" thing is back with us, only instead of a dress, this time it's a shoe.

Personally, I see this shoe as gray and a sort of turquoise-greenish-blue, but apparently there are people who see it as pink and white.  What's certain is that once you see it a particular way, you can't somehow see it the other way, as you can with flip-flop illusions like the famous duck and rabbit.

What's different about the claims floating around this time is that supposedly, the fact that I see it as gray and green means I'm a left-brain, logical, sequential, concrete type, and the people who see it as pink and white are right-brain creative, holistic, abstract thinkers.  The problem with this is that a 2017 study at the University of Utah concluded that there is nothing to the right-vs.-left brain dichotomy, at least insofar as personality is concerned.  "It is certainly the case that some people have more methodical, logical cognitive styles, and others more uninhibited, spontaneous style," said Jeffrey Anderson, a neuroscientist who co-authored the study.  "This has nothing to do on any level with the different functions of the [brain's] left and right hemisphere."

It is true that people do tend to have a dominant side of the brain, and this can influence you physically -- for example, what hand you write with and which eye is dominant.  I know on brain-dominance tests I tend to score right in the middle -- left on some tasks, right on others.  When I was in kindergarten I switched which hand I wrote with about a dozen times, till my frustrated teacher told me to simmer down and pick one, for pity's sake, so I ended up right handed.  But I still do a lot of things with my left hand, and probably would be considered mixed-brain dominant.

But the point here is, it has nothing whatsoever to do with my personality, nor with how I perceive color.

The unfortunate part is that this simplistic and inaccurate account of the gray/green vs. pink/white split ignores the fact that we do have a possible explanation for why this happens, and it's actually a good bit more interesting than "you're a right-brained creative type."  The reason seems to be that we evaluate and interpret colors by comparison with their context, not in any sense the "absolute color" of the object (which, as you'll see, is a meaningless concept).  As a rather startling illustration of this, how would you compare the color saturation of the two squares marked A and B in the drawing below?

Nearly everyone is absolutely convinced that A is a lot darker than B, but the fact is, they're exactly the same shade of gray.  The reason your brain made the decision that they're different -- a decision that, even once you know what's going on, is damn near impossible to shake -- is that you interpret B as if it were in a shadow, so in order to appear the shade it is, it must be inherently lighter.  If A and B were observed in the same level of light (your brain says), B would have to be lighter.

Even more striking is the image below:

I'm sure you've already figured out that the band in the middle is all the same shade of gray -- which you can prove to yourself by blocking out the background with a piece of paper.  But as I said, once your brain has made the decision that it's a gradient, it's impossible to compromise.

You do the same thing with colors.  Here's an example -- and once again, A, B, and C are all exactly the same color:

You get the point.  The thing is, you're doing this all the time without being aware of it, and once you have settled on what you're seeing, your brain won't admit it's wrong.  The same is happening with the shoes.  You decide which part of the image to compare the color to, and interpret every other color in the image on the basis of that decision.

We still don't know why some people settle on gray/green and others on pink/white.  But it has nothing to do with which side of the brain is dominant, nor whether you're creative or logical.  It has to do with our faulty method for integrating the data coming from our eyes.  It works well enough most of the time, sure; but when it fails, it fails spectacularly.

So feel free to repost the shoe pic and ask your friends which they see, but kindly don't attribute any differences to your favored side of the brain.  Instead, think about what's really going on here -- which, honestly, is far more interesting.

*************************************

I grew up going once a summer with my dad to southern New Mexico and southern Arizona, with the goal of... finding rocks.  It's an odd hobby for a kid to have, but I'd been fascinated by rocks and minerals since I was very young, and it was helped along by the fact that my dad did beautiful lapidary work.  So while he was poking around looking for turquoise and agates and gem-quality jade, I was using my little rock hammer to hack out chunks of sandstone and feldspar and quartzite and wondering how, why, and when they'd gotten there.

Turns out that part of the country has some seriously complicated geology, and I didn't really appreciate just how complicated until I read John McPhee's four-part series called Annals of the Former World.  Composed of Basin and Range, In Suspect Terrain, Rising from the Plains, and Assembling California, it describes a cross-country trip McPhee took on Interstate 80, accompanied along the way with various geologists, with whom he stops at every roadcut and outcrop along the way.  As usual with McPhee's books they concentrate on the personalities of the people he's with as much as the science.  But you'll come away with a good appreciation for Deep Time -- and how drastically our continent has changed during the past billion years.

[Note:  If you order this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds will go to support Skeptophilia!]

In your right mind

Another peculiarity of the human brain is lateralization, which is the tendency of the brain to have a dominant side.  It's most clearly reflected in hand dominance; because of the cross-wiring of the brain, people who are right-handed have a tendency to be left brain dominant, and vice versa.  (There's more to it than that, as some people who are right handed are, for example, left eye dominant, but handedness is the most familiar manifestation of brain lateralization.)

It bears mention at this juncture that the common folk wisdom that brain lateralization has an influence on your personality -- that, for instance, left brain dominant people are sequential, mathematical, and logical, and right brain dominant people are creative, artistic, and holistic -- is complete nonsense.  That myth has been around for a long while, and has been roundly debunked, but still persists for some reason.

I first was introduced to the concept of brain dominance when I was in eighth grade.  I was having some difficulty reading, and my English teacher, Mrs. Gates, told me she thought I was mixed-brain dominant -- that I didn't have a strongly lateralized brain -- and that this often lead to processing disorders like dyslexia.  (She was right, but they still don't know why that connection exists.)  It made sense.  When I was in kindergarten, I switched back and forth between writing with my right and left hand about five times until my teacher got fed up and told me to simmer down and pick one.  I picked my right hand, and have stuck with it ever since, but I still have a lot of lefty characteristics.  I tend to pick up a drinking glass with my left hand, and I'm strongly left eye dominant, for example.

Anyhow, Mrs. Gates identified my mixed-brainness, and the outcome apropos of my reading facility, but she also told me that there was one thing that mixed-brain people can learn faster than anyone else.  Because of our nearly-equal control from both sides of the brain, we can do a cool thing, which Mrs. Gates taught me and I learned in fifteen seconds flat.  I can write, in cursive, forward with my right hand while I'm writing the same thing backwards with my left.  (Because it's me, they're both pretty illegible, but it's still kind of a fun party trick.)

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Fast forward to today.  Some recent research has begun to elucidate the evolutionary reasons behind lateralization.  It's been known for years that lots of animals are lateralized, so it stands to reason that it must confer some kind of evolutionary advantage, but what that might be was unclear... until now.

Research by a team led by Onur Güntürkün, of the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience at Ruhr-University Bochum, in Germany, has looked at lateralization in animals from cockatoos to zebra fish to humans, and has described the possible evolutionary rationale for having a dominant side of the brain.

"What you do with your hands is a miracle of biological evolution," Güntürkün says.  "We are the master of our hands, and by funneling this training to one hemisphere of our brains, we can become more proficient at that kind of dexterity.  Natural selection likely provided an advantage that resulted in a proportion of the population -- about 10% -- favoring the opposite hand. The thing that connects the two is parallel processing, which enables us to do two things that use different parts of the brain at the same time."

Additionally, Güntürkün says, our perceptual systems have also evolved that kind of division of labor.  Both left and right brain have visual recognition centers, but in humans the one on the right side is more devoted to image recognition, and the one on the left to word and symbol recognition.  And this is apparently a very old evolutionary innovation, long predating our use of language; even pigeons have a split perceptual function between the two sides of the brain (and therefore between their eyes).  They tend to tilt their heads so their left eye is scanning the ground for food while their right one scans the sky for predators.

So what might seem to be a bad idea -- ceding more control to one side of the brain than the other, making one hand more nimble than the other --turns out to have a distinct advantage.  And if you'll indulge me in a little bit of linguistics geekery, for good measure, even our word "dexterous" reflects this phenomenon.  "Dexter" is Latin for "right," and reflects the commonness of right-handers, who were considered to be more skillful.  (And when you find out that the Latin word for "left" is "sinister," you get a rather unfortunate lens into attitudes toward southpaws.)

Anyhow, there you have it; another interesting feature of our brain physiology explained, and one that has a lot of potential for increasing our understanding of neural development.  "Studying asymmetry can provide the most basic blueprints for how the brain is organized," Güntürkün says.  "It gives us an unprecedented window into the wiring of the early, developing brain that ultimately determines the fate of the adult brain.  Because asymmetry is not limited to human brains, a number of animal models have emerged that can help unravel both the genetic and epigenetic foundations for the phenomenon of lateralization."

We've got your number

As a science teacher, one of the things I find fascinating and perplexing is the phenomenon of innumeracy.

An innumerate person is someone who doesn't understand numbers.  We're not talking about simple ignorance of algebra, here; we're talking about someone who has no fundamental comprehension of quantity.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

As an example, take a student of mine who took physics with me, perhaps 25 years ago.  We were studying electrical force, and there was a problem set up that allowed you, with a few given parameters, to calculate the mass of an electron.  So after working for a time, this kid raised her hand, and asked, "Is this the right answer?"

She'd gotten the answer "36 kilograms."

Now, I'll point out from the get-go that she'd made a simple computational error -- divided when she should have multiplied.  What struck me is that she had no idea her answer was wrong.  When I said, "Doesn't your answer seem a little large, for an electron?" she replied, "Is it?  It's what my calculator said."

What's curious about innumerate people is that they're frequently quite good at rote cookbook math -- they can follow lists of directions like champs.  But they have no real sense of numbers, so they have no way to tell if they've gotten the wrong answer.

What's also interesting is that there are people who are pretty competent with small numbers, but lose it entirely with large numbers.  An exercise I used to do with my physics students to help correct this -- which, allow me to say up front, wasn't particularly successful -- was to have them do order-of-magnitude estimation problems.  Within an order of magnitude, how many ping-pong balls would it take to fill the classroom?  How many 1'x1' floor tiles are in the entire school?  How many telephone books in a stack would it take to reach from the Earth to the Moon?  And so on.  Once again, these kids could do the problems, once you'd established a protocol for how to solve them; but I don't think they really got any better at understanding magnitudes through doing it than they had to start with.

Now, scientists at Imperial College in London have gained an insight into why this big-versus-small number comprehension issue might exist; they have found that big and small numbers are processed in different parts of the brain.

The study, led by Qadeer Arshad of the Department of Medicine, said that the idea for the study came from studying victims of strokes whose damage interfered with very specific abilities apropos of number processing. "Following early insights from stroke patients we wanted to find out exactly how the brain processes numbers," Arshad said.  "In our new study, in which we used healthy volunteers, we found the left side processes large numbers, and the right processes small numbers.  So for instance if you were looking at a clock, the numbers one to six would be processed on the right side of the brain, and six to twelve would be processed on the left."

The team then used a procedure to activate one side of the brain more than the other, and asked the volunteers to do various estimation tasks.  Interestingly, people had a systematic tendency to err in a opposite directions depending on which side of the brain was stimulated.  "When we activated the right side of the brain, the volunteers were saying smaller numbers," Arshad explained.  "For instance, if we asked the middle point of 50-100, they were saying 65 instead of 75.  But when we activated the left side of the brain, the volunteers were saying numbers above 75."

Apparently, the context of the task was also critical.  "If someone was looking at a range of 50-100 then the number 80 will probably be processed on the left side of the brain," Arshad explained.   "However, if they are looking at a range of 50-300, then 80 will now be small number, and processed on the right."

Which at least gives a preliminary explanation of why there are students who do just fine with manipulating small numbers, but fall apart completely when dealing with large ones.  I deal with kids for whom 10,000 years ago, 1,000,000 years ago, and 1,000,000,000 years ago all sound about the same -- "big" -- making it difficult to give them any real sense of the time scale of evolutionary biology.

Anyhow, I think the study by Arshad et al. is fascinating, and gives us a further window into understanding how our brains work.  Which is all to the good.  Although it still doesn't quite answer how someone could think that a 36 kilogram electron sounds reasonable.

Thinking with both sides of the brain

One of the reasons I love science is that it challenges our preconceived notions about the way the world works.

We are data-gatherers and pattern-noticers, we humans.  Even as babies we are watching and learning, and trying to make generalizations about the world based on what we've experienced.  And while many of those generalizations turn out to be correct -- we wouldn't have lasted long as a species if they weren't -- we sometimes draw incorrect conclusions.

And when we do, we tend to hang onto them like grim death.  Once people have settled on a model, for whatever reason -- be it that "it seems like common sense" or that it has gained currency as some kind of "urban legend" -- it becomes extremely hard to undo, even when the science is unequivocal that our beliefs are wrong.

I ran across a particularly good example of that this week.  I teach an introductory neurology class, and when we start talking about brain physiology and its role in personality, inevitably someone brings up the phenomenon of brain lateralization -- the fact that, as we develop, one side of the brain exerts more influence over us physically than the other does.  This is why most of us have a dominant hand, foot, eye, and so forth.

Most common biological traits can be explained based upon some kind of evolutionary advantage they provide, but the jury's still out on this one.  Halpern et al. concluded, in 2005 in The Journal of Neuroscience, in their paper "Lateralization of the Vertebrate Brain: Taking the Side of Model Systems," that the evolutionary advantage of allowing one side of the brain to dominate the motor activity of the body is that it allows the other, non-dominant side to do other things -- something they call "parallel processing."  But even they admitted that this was speculation.

One claim that gained a lot of currency, beginning in the 1960s, was that people who were right brain dominant were artistic, creative, and saw things holistically, and that people who were left brain dominant were logical, verbal, mathematical, and sequential.

Now, there may be some truth to the claim that the sensory-processing centers on the two sides of the brain do see the word differently -- studies done on people who have had strokes in the cerebrum, and those with "split brains" (who have had the corpus callosum cut, preventing cross-talk between the two cerebral hemispheres), do seem to support that there is a dramatic difference in how the two sides of the brain interpret what you see.   (For an amazing personal account that supports this view, check out Jill Bolte Taylor's talk "A Stroke of Insight.")

The idea that people with intact brains are either artistic right-brainers or logical left-brainers has led to a whole slew of "therapies" meant to allow people to "balance their brains."  It has been especially targeted at the left-brainers, who are sometimes seen as cold and calculating.

Many of these treatments require such things as forcing people to write or perform actions with their non-dominant hands, or patching their dominant eye -- the claim being that this will force the poor, subjugated non-dominant side of the brain to feel free to express itself, resulting in an enlightened, fully-realized personality.

All of this, apparently, is pseudoscience.

I've suspected this for a while, frankly.  In my neurology class, we do a physical brain dominance test, and someone always asks about brain lateralization's role in personality.  When this happens, I have had to do something I am always reluctant to do, which is to say, "Well, I haven't seen any research, but this seems to me to be bogus."

I don't have to say that any more. 

Two weeks ago, the peer-reviewed journal PLOS-One published a paper by Jared A. Nielsen, Brandon A. Zielinski, Michael A. Ferguson, Janet E. Lainhart, and Jeffrey S. Anderson entitled, "An Evaluation of the Left-Brain vs. Right-Brain Hypothesis with Resting State Functional Connectivity Magnetic Resonance Imaging."  In this paper they describe a series of experiments that looked at the actual structure of the brain, and its connectivity -- and they found that there's no such thing as a "right-brain" personality and "left-brain" personality based upon anything real that is present in the brain wiring.  Here's what they said in their discussion section:

In popular reports, “left-brained” and “right-brained” have become terms associated with both personality traits and cognitive strategies, with a “left-brained” individual or cognitive style typically associated with a logical, methodical approach and “right-brained” with a more creative, fluid, and intuitive approach. Based on the brain regions we identified as hubs in the broader left-dominant and right-dominant connectivity networks, a more consistent schema might include left-dominant connections associated with language and perception of internal stimuli, and right-dominant connections associated with attention to external stimuli.

Yet our analyses suggest that an individual brain is not “left-brained” or “right-brained” as a global property, but that asymmetric lateralization is a property of individual nodes or local subnetworks, and that different aspects of the left-dominant network and right-dominant network may show relatively greater or lesser lateralization within an individual.

So the truth turns out to be more complicated, but more interesting, than the commonly-accepted model.  We tend to do that a lot, don't we?  After all, what is much of pseudoscience but an attempt to impress order upon nature, to make it fit in neat little packages, to make it work the way we'd like it to?  Astrology, for example, would have you believe that there are twelve personality types, and that anything about your behavior that needs explanation can be filed under the heading of, "Oh, but of course I'm like that.  I'm a Scorpio."

But the world is complex and messy, and doesn't care about our desire for order.  However, it is also beautiful and mysterious and fascinating, and ultimately, understandable.  And science remains our best lens for doing so, for blowing away the dust and cobwebs of our preconceived notions, and helping us to comprehend the world as it is.

And it works regardless of which side of the brain you're thinking with.