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What part of your brain is responsible for logic or complex thinking? - Updated 2017

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What part of your brain is responsible for logic or complex thinking? - Updated 2017

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What part of your brain is responsible for logic or complex thinking?

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Answer (1 of 13): Here is represented an article from www.livestrong.com "Parts of the Brain Associated With Thinking Skills By Dr. Heidi Moawad Feb 04, 2017 The brain is a remarkable and complex structure responsible for thinking skills. Several parts of the brain work together in a sophisti...

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Have you ever heard people say that they tend to be more of a right-brain or left-brain thinker? From books to television programs, you've probably heard the phrase mentioned numerous times or perhaps you've even taken an online test to determine which type best describes you. You've probably spotted at least a few infographics on Pinterest or Facebook claiming to reveal your dominant brain hemisphere.

You've probably also come across a few articles or books suggesting you can unleash the hidden creativity of right brain thinking or the deductive logic of left-brain thinking.

People described as left-brain thinkers are told that they have strong math and logic skills. Those who are described as right-brain thinkers, on the other hand, are told that their talents are more on the creative side of things. Given the popularity of the idea of "right-brained" and "left-brained" thinkers, it might surprise you learn that this idea is just one of many myths about the brain.

What Is Left Brain-Right Brain Theory?

According to the theory of left-brain or right-brain dominance, each side of the brain controls different types of thinking. Additionally, people are said to prefer one type of thinking over the other.

For example, a person who is "left-brained" is often said to be more logical, analytical, and objective.

A person who is "right-brained" is said to be more intuitive, thoughtful, and subjective.

In psychology, the theory is based on the lateralization of brain function. The brain contains two hemispheres that each performs a number of roles. The two sides of the brain communicate with one another via corpus callosum.

The left hemisphere controls the muscles on the right side of the body while the right hemisphere controls those on the left. This is why damage to the left side of the brain, for example, might have an effect on the right side of the body.

Where Did the Idea of a Stronger Left Brain or Right Brain Come From?

So does one side of the brain control specific functions? Are people either left-brained or right-brained? Like many popular psychology myths, this one grew out of observations of the human brain that were then dramatically distorted and exaggerated.

The right brain-left brain theory originated in the work of Roger W. Sperry, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1981. While studying the effects of epilepsy, Sperry discovered that cutting the corpus callosum (the structure that connects the two hemispheres of the brain) could reduce or eliminate seizures.

However, these patients also experienced other symptoms after the communication pathway between the two sides of the brain was cut. For example, many split-brain patients found themselves unable to name objects that were processed by the right side of the brain but were able to name objects that were processed by the left-side of the brain.

Based on this information, Sperry suggested that language was controlled by the left-side of the brain.

Generally speaking, the left side of the brain tends to control many aspects of language and logic, while the right side tends to handle spatial information and visual comprehension.

So Is One Side of Your Brain Really Stronger Than the Other?

Later research has shown that the brain is not nearly as dichotomous as once thought. For example, research has shown that abilities in subjects such as math are strongest when both halves of the brain work together. Today, neuroscientists know that the two sides of the brain collaborate to perform a broad variety of tasks and that the two hemispheres communicate through the corpus callosum.

"No matter how lateralized the brain can get, though, the two sides still work together," science writer Carl Zimmer explained in an article for Discover magazine.

"The pop psychology notion of a left brain and a right brain doesn't capture their intimate working relationship. The left hemisphere specializes in picking out the sounds that form words and working out the syntax of the phrase, for example, but it does not have a monopoly on language processing. The right hemisphere is more sensitive to the emotional features of language, tuning in to the slow rhythms of speech that carry intonation and stress."

In one study by researchers at the University of Utah, more 1,000 participants had their brains analyzed in order to determine if they preferred using one side over the other. The study revealed that while activity was sometimes higher in certain critical regions, both sides of the brain were essentially equal in their activity on average.

"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," explained the study's lead author Dr. Jeff Anderson.

While the idea of right brain/left brain thinkers has been debunked, its popularity persists. So what exactly did this theory suggest?

The Right Brain

According to the left-brain, right-brain dominance theory, the right side of the brain is best at expressive and creative tasks. Some of the abilities popularly associated with the right side of the brain include:

The Left Brain

The left-side of the brain is considered to be adept at tasks that involve logic, language, and analytical thinking. The left-brain is described as being better at:

So Why Do People Still Talk About Right-Brain, Left-Brain Theory?

Researchers have demonstrated that right-brain/left-brain theory is a myth, yet its popularity persists. Why? Unfortunately, many people are likely unaware that the theory is outdated. Unfortunately, the idea seems to have taken on a mind of its own within popular culture. From magazine articles to books to online quizzes, you are probably bound to see information suggested that you can unleash the power of your mind if you just discover which side of your brain is stronger or more dominant.

Today, students might continue to learn about the theory as a point of historical interest - to understand how our ideas about how the brain works have evolved and changed over time as researchers have learned more about how the brain operates.

While over-generalized and overstated by popular psychology and self-help texts, understanding your strengths and weaknesses in certain areas can help you develop better ways to learn and study. For example, students who have a difficult time following verbal instructions (often cited as a right-brain characteristic) might benefit from writing down directions and developing better organizational skills. The important thing to remember if you take one of the many left brain/right brain quizzes that you will likely encounter online is that they are entirely for fun and you shouldn't place much stock in your results.
Nielsen, JA, Zielinski, BA, Ferguson, MA, Lainhart, JE, & Anderson, JS. An Evaluation of the Left-Brain vs. Right-Brain Hypothesis With Resting State Functional Connectivity Magnetic Resonance Imaging. PLOS One; 2013. Rogers, M. Researchers Debunk Myth of "Right Brain" and "Left-Brain" Personality Traits. University of Utah, Office of Public Affairs; 2013.

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Left Brain vs. Right Brain: The Surprising Truth

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Have you ever heard people say that they tend to be more of a right-brain or left-brain thinker? From books to television programs, you've probably heard the phrase mentioned numerous times or perhaps you've even taken an online test to determine which type best describes you.

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Puzzles and the Brain | Psychology Today

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Puzzles and the Brain | Psychology Today

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I recently googled relevant psychology, neuroscience, aging, and education websites to get a sense of the kind of research being conducted on the relation between puzzles, and general brain functioning. I found an astronomical number of sites. I then looked up sources that I considered to be scientifically reliable ones. Much of the research in this domain turns out to be ambiguous, and certainly not as optimistic as it is claimed to be by the media. For example, a study published in Brain and Cognition (Volume 46, 2001, pp. 95-179) showed that the elderly performed significantly poorer on the Towers of Hanoi puzzle than younger subjects. The puzzle-in case you are not familiar with it-consists of three pegs requiring solvers to move the concentric disks placed on the left peg in order from the smallest on top to the largest on the bottom to the right peg so that at no point in the movement of the disks can a larger one rest on top of a smaller one. Direction of movement is not restricted.

Another study examining crosswords and aging published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology (Volume 128 [2]. 1999, pp. 131-164) found no evidence to suggest that crossword puzzle experience reduces age-related decline in cognition. However, in other work, one of the researchers, E. J. Meinze, found evidence to suggest that a high level of experience with crosswords in older subjects does seem to partially attenuate the negative effects of age on memory and perceptual speed tasks (Psychology of Aging, Volume 15 [2], 2000, pp. 297-312).

So, does doing crosswords, Sudoku, logic puzzles, visual conundrums, and the like diminish the ravaging effects on mental skills by the process of aging? Does puzzle solving enhance cognition generally? I became interested in these questions after working with brain-damaged children in Italy in the mid-1980s (with results published in my book Cervello, lingua, ed educazione [Brain, Language, and Education], 1988). Here's what I did. If a child was assessed as having a weak visual symbol memory, impairing how she or he spelled words or read them, I would prepare appropriate puzzle material, such as jumbled letters that the child would unscramble to construct words. If the word were "tiger" I would give the child the jumbled form "gerti" and a picture of a tiger. What surprised me was how quickly the children improved in their writing and reading skills. However, I had no real explanation for the improvement. We know so little about the connection between brain activities and learning processes that the outcomes I was able to produce may indicate nothing more than a "co-occurrence" between an input and a brain activity, not a "correlation" between the two. Nevertheless, from that experience, it is my cautious opinion that puzzles are beneficial to brain activity and I will attempt to explain here why I believe this is so.
Consider a simple riddle such as: "What is yours yet others use more than you do?" The riddle stumps many people because it cannot be "thought out" through straightforward "logic." The solver has to think outside the puzzle content itself and use knowledge of language, experience, and other "external mental activities" to solve it. The answer is: "Your name." Once the answer is understood, memory for it remains much more permanent because it is unexpected. The psychologists Sternberg and Davidson argued, as far back as 1982 (Psychology Today, Volume 16, pp. 37-44), that solving puzzles entails the ability to compare hidden information in a puzzle with information already in memory, and, more importantly, the ability to combine the information to form novel information and ideas. The thinking involved in solving puzzles can thus be characterized as a blend of imaginative association and memory. It is this blend, I would claim, that leads us to literally see the pattern or twist that a puzzle conceals. It is a kind of "clairvoyance" that typically provokes an Aha! effect.

I should mention that some of the research I came across suggests that culture is a factor in how puzzles affect brain functioning. I'm not sure what to make of this line of research. Even though people speak different languages, puzzles seem to rise above culture-specific modes of understanding the world. The classic case-in-point is the following puzzle:

A traveler comes to a riverbank with a wolf, a goat, and a head of cabbage. He finds a boat there that can hold himself and one other. How does he get his animals and cabbage across safely? He cannot leave the goat alone with the wolf, for the wolf would eat the goat; and he cannot leave the goat alone with the cabbage, for the goat would eat it.

The traveler starts by bringing the goat across. He leaves the animal there and goes back. On the original side, he picks up the wolf (he could also pick up the cabbage), goes across, leaves the wolf on the other side, and goes back with the goat. On the original side he leaves the goat, picks up the cabbage and goes across. He leaves the cabbage safely with the wolf and goes back to pick up the goat on the original side for his last trip across. Now, this version comes down to us from the pen of Alcuin (c. 735-804), the English scholar, theologian, and adviser to Charlemagne. But the same puzzle is found across the world in different linguistic and cultural guises-that is, the details may change, but the structure remains the same, involving curious situations with people such as cannibals, jealous husbands, etc. All this suggests that the puzzle is culture-independent. It is part of a common human imagination. Puzzles seem to tap into a universal part of brain functioning, even though they may appear in different cultural forms. The great British puzzles Henry E. Dudeney (1857-1930) once put it as follows:

The curious propensity for propounding puzzles is not peculiar to any race or any period of history. It is simply innate, though it is always showing itself in different forms; whether the individual be a Sphinx of Egypt, a Samson of Hebrew lore, an Indian fakir, a Chinese philosopher, a mahatma of Tibet, or a European mathematician makes little difference (The Canterbury Puzzles and Other Curious Problems, 1958, p. 12).

There is little doubt in my mind that puzzles are beneficial, ambiguous empirical findings aside. I saw this with my own eyes within my own family. I once suggested to an ailing relative, who suffered from a serious brain-degenerative disease, to engage in crosswords and Sudoku. He had never done puzzles in his life. His doctor immediately saw a significant slowing down of the degeneration. The relative eventually died of the disease, but I am convinced that his newly-found passion for puzzles delayed his eventual loss of consciousness. I will return in a future blog to puzzle solving. But I would really like to get your own ideas on the theme of this one, especially if you also have anecdotal evidence such as the one I mention here or else are a researcher in the field.

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I recently googled relevant psychology, neuroscience, aging, and education websites to get a sense of the kind of research being conducted on the relation between puzzles, and general brain functioning. I found an astronomical number of sites. I then looked up sources that I considered to be scientifically reliable ones.

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Why Solving Puzzles Is Fun: Q&A with Consciousness Researcher Daniel Bor | TIME.com

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Why Solving Puzzles Is Fun: Q&A with Consciousness Researcher Daniel Bor | TIME.com

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Tony Hutchings / Getty Images

Why do people voluntarily spend time struggling with problems like sudoku or crossword puzzles? According to neuroscientist Daniel Bor, a research fellow at the University of Sussex in England and author of the new book The Ravenous Brain: How the New Science of Consciousness Explains Our Insatiable Search for Meaning, it's because we take great pleasure in pattern-finding. What's more, that conclusion has big implications for understanding the brain, consciousness and even neurological disorders like autism. We spoke with Bor recently.

Why do you call the brain "ravenous"?
Human brains have an extreme form of consciousness: they're ravenous for new innovative solutions to problems in the world, ravenous for optimizing our lives, for building pyramids of knowledge. I was trying to capture [the sense of hunger that] extreme forms of consciousness have about searching for knowledge and for understanding.

You posit that evolution selected for organisms that are good information processors, that are able to acquire accurate information about the world in order to guide their behavior.
One view is that of Richard Dawkins, that it's all about the selfish gene and that organisms are merely temporary carriers of genes. I was arguing that that [perspective] might miss something crucial about the process of evolution, which is that genes capture something. On some level, they capture something about the world that's accurate and relevant to [their] own survival: there's an accumulation of knowledge, of implicit information and representation in organisms, but that doesn't mean all organisms are conscious. It means that by this stage, 4 billion years after [life first arose], most creatures are sophisticated information-processing devices.

So what does that mean for animal consciousness?
Some animals may well be conscious because they have an extra layer in their brains that processes information online. When you get to great apes and humans, we have an extreme form of information processing, which I closely link with consciousness when it gets very sophisticated and extensive.

How do you define consciousness?
In terms of the mind, consciousness is the product of attention, so we can focus only on a small subset of the world that's most important to us. It isn't so much about automatic habits, which we are barely conscious of. Instead, it's about trying to solve novel or complex problems. We have a mental space dedicated to complex problem solving. What makes human consciousness unique is our ravenous appetite for these innovative lessons that help us solve these novel or complex problems.

Consciousness is generated primarily by our most densely connected brain regions and related to the fastest brain waves. Every moment of our waking lives, there's a hidden war going on between different populations of neurons [for access to it]. The war involves winning support of active [neurons] and taking over the advanced parts of the cortex, and the victorious neuronal populations control what we attend to - and [that is] what we are conscious of.

Do you think we have any choice in consciousness, any free will?
Choice is a huge separate issue. It can at least appear that we have choice. If I'm in a crowded train station, looking for my wife who is wearing red, I can constrain my attention by looking for red [and the parts of the brain that represent red are more likely to win] than any other bits.

Attention in the standard textbooks is divided into two kinds, one is voluntary, where we set some goal, and the other is extrinsic, where something in the environment takes over what we attend to. A looming animal coming straight at us - we wouldn't have much choice in attending to that.

What made you decide to study neuroscience, rather than philosophy?
As an undergraduate, I studied both philosophy and psychology, mainly neuroscience, as the equivalent of a double major. It was a question of which one to go for. Philosophy I enjoyed for its apparently crisp logic, but it was frustrating because it didn't seem like it was particularly progressing at the time; it seemed vague and not in touch with current neuroscience, which was very progressive and cutting edge.

[And] at the time I was doing my final exams, my father unfortunately had a stroke. That made it very clear that things that are very intimate to us like our personality or even our very consciousness itself can be impaired or changed by some relatively small brain injury. ... And that made me side [with] neuroscience as well.

Because it showed you that consciousness depends specifically on the brain?
It's just too obvious. Maybe philosophers would say that I'm missing some subtle points.

You also discuss anesthesia and the question of how we can know when someone is conscious.
There are behavioral measures that you can apply, which have drawbacks. There are experiments done giving varying doses of anesthetics and seeing at what point you stop following commands, at what point do your eyes close, which are reasonably useful. ... There are other measures that look at brainwaves and when they take on a certain pattern, it is clear that you are not conscious. That's currently the best way of knowing whether you are truly unconscious.

What about states like coma and minimal consciousness?
There are some people [with brain injuries] that enter a vegetative state and don't recover and others that eventually make a reasonable recovery. You can look at which bits are needed for recovery - not just which parts, but also how they communicate with each other. It's increasingly clear that in order to be able to regain reasonable levels of consciousness, you need at least the thalamus, which is like a relay center in the middle of the brain, and a reasonably intact prefrontal cortex and the back part of the parietal lobe. Those regions map very closely to studies looking at how consciousness changes [under anesthesia]. ... It's the thalamus and prefrontal parietal networks that tend to be activated [during consciousness].

So when those regions are offline, you are unconscious?
It depends on how you define offline. [We don't know] exactly what mechanism turns [consciousness off, and these regions aren't simply inactive during unconsciousness]. The prefrontal cortex gets locked into a very tight rhythm with the thalamus, and such tight connection blocks out all communication with the rest of brain; that shuts out long range communication and consciousness as well.

You also write about neurological and psychiatric conditions that can alter consciousness, and suggest that autistic people might actually have more consciousness than others.
Autism is one of those odd-one-out conditions in the literature. The classical assumption was that most severely autistic children are mentally disabled and have low IQs, but that's partly because they weren't tested properly. If you test them on nonverbal IQ, they are normal or slightly better than normal. On other tests, they perform better than average for perceptual tasks. Some people are now suggesting that maybe it isn't a deficit, that they have a different kind of [brain that has certain] advantages. With Asperger's, which probably many prominent scientists have, whether they are diagnosed or not, it seems almost as if they have extra consciousness: they are better able to process information than normal, which I think is a fascinating idea.

The whole idea that autism is [primarily] a social disorder, I don't think that theory is going to last into the next decade because there is increasingly successful treatment that centers on socializing that has turned very withdrawn children into very affectionate socially aware children: I don't see that as fundamental [to autism].

Do you support the "intense world" theory of autism, which suggests that problems result from sensory overload?
I just think [the social issues] are a side effect of the way [people with autism] approach the world. They are searching for patterns and structure in the world - what they obsess over isn't everything; it's mainly structures, stuff like calendars and mathematical patterns.

I worked with the prodigy, Daniel Tammet. [Tammet holds the European record for memorizing the 22,514 digits in pi.] He seemed very extremely autistic as kid and has been officially diagnosed with Asperger's syndrome, but if you meet him, he's very socially aware. He maintains eye contact. He decided in his teen years to teach himself [to be social and he did].

In what context did you work with Tammet?
We did a brain scan study [where we looked at his brain after he had memorized short sequences of numbers that were either patterned or random]. It was very striking compared to normal people. He completely failed to spot the external structure [in the nonrandom numbers] and his brain activation was very different from those who were aware of the structure. I make the claim that the prefrontal parietal network is important for consciousness; in my study, the prefrontal parietal network was most active when spotting these patterns and maybe that means a lot about what consciousness is for. For Daniel Tammet, his prefrontal parietal network didn't activate for these sequences because he didn't spot them, but it was generally raised compared to those of normal people.

So what do you think the purpose of consciousness is?
I think the purpose of it is to draw all the relevant information together in a larger space. It's almost as if we can't spot it because we are doing it all the time. Why do we love crossword puzzles and why are people addicted to sudoku? That's what a huge bit of the cortex is primed to do - to spot [patterns] - and once we spot them we can assimilate them into our pyramid of knowledge and build more layers of strategy, and knowing how to do that makes us incredibly successful at controlling the world.

And that's why solving puzzles or finding a useful bit of information feels so good?
We get streams of pleasure when we find something that can really help us understand some deep pattern. Sudoku isn't the most [fun activity], but it sure feels good when you put in that last number. It's why scientists love doing research. The way I approach my job, it's like trying to solve a really big fuzzy crossword puzzle and when you do put in that new clue and see the deeper pattern, that's incredibly pleasurable.

If our brains are hungry for information, then why do we tend to see learning as a chore and fail to recognize it as a huge source of pleasure?
I don't know. Obviously, more intelligent people get more pleasure from spotting these patterns, but I think almost every normal person does this. I think it's a pretty pervasive thing but it's almost as if we can't notice it because it's so pervasive.

See more of Healthland's 'Mind Reading' series.

Maia Szalavitz is a health writer for TIME.com. Find her on Twitter at . You can also continue the discussion on TIME Healthland' s Facebook page and on Twitter at @TIMEHealthland.

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Why Solving Puzzles Is Fun: Q&A with Consciousness Researcher Daniel Bor

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Why do people voluntarily spend time struggling with problems like sudoku or crossword puzzles? According to neuroscientist Daniel Bor, a research fellow at the University of Sussex in England and author of the new book The Ravenous Brain: How the New Science of Consciousness Explains Our Insatiable...