It’s a bit
of a trick question as people are very rarely just left brained or just right
brained, unless they have some damage to the hemispheres. It’s popularly
believed that the right brain is used when you are being more creative or
recalling rote learned things like tables and rhymes, while the left brain is for
more logical activities such as adding up figures and so on.
Although there is a lot of truth in that, it’s very simplistic. Brain activity
actually moves from one side to the other depending on what you are doing. When
I am doing my SEO copywriting for example, I probably use the left and right
sides of my brain throughout the writing. I may be working on statistics
or key word research (very left brained) but then stop and imagine links
between words and phrases ‘in my mind’s eye’ (very right brained).
Anyway, all this is leading up to the intriguing spinning dancer puzzle that is
doing the rounds on the Internet. I immediately saw it spinning clockwise,
indicating a preference for using the right brain. But when I looked at it from
the corner of my eye while reading some text on the page it changed
direction.
Of course
there is a logical explanation, which is that the image is an optical illusion
known as a ‘reversible’ and that something in our visual system ‘clicks in and
switches the direction of the image. Sometimes I hate logical explanations, don’t
you?
Whatever… it’s good fun.
Hilarious. If I look at her straight on she spins clockwise; if I look at her from the corner of either eye she sways her leg backward & forward without spinning. She also appears to be jumping up and down at the same time. So I am a rightbrained person (which is a HUGE surprise) with weirdness at the edges of my brain (which is not a surprise).
Ew, just looked again and now I’m getting nauseous.
Hi Jane
I must admit I love this illusion! And right brain is definitely where I want to be a lot of the time – just need to kick my left brain out of the way.