I am Balanced-Brained! :)

I recently took a Brain test on www.Tickle.com that is PH. D certified. I find this all facinating, as Psychology was one of my favorite classes in both high school & in college. It was fun to find out the results:

The Brain Test

What Your Brain Says About How You Think and Learn

Your brain is divided into two hemispheres, the right and the left. Just as you favor your left or right hand, you also favor the right or left hemisphere of your brain. The left hemisphere interprets details and reasoning, while the right hemisphere interprets information through visual or creative cues.

Find out which side of your brain you favor, and how to train your weaker brain hemisphere to process information better and faster. Take the test!


Paula, you are Balanced-brained, which means that you rely equally on both the left and right hemispheres of your brain.

You have a balanced brain — able to draw on the strengths of both the right and left hemispheres depending on context. Typically, people with balanced right and left hemispheres are very comfortable with switching between local and global perspectives — that is, paying attention to both small details and larger issues when the circumstance indicates. That means they can identify elements that make up an image or situation and also attend to the larger, more holistic pattern or unified whole that those details comprise.

You are able to capitalize on the left hemisphere's skills in verbal communication as well on the right hemisphere's focus on patterns and association making. This rare combination makes you a very creative and flexible thinker.

Depending on the situation, you may rely on one hemisphere or the other. Some situations may lend themselves to using your right brain's creativity and flexibility while other situations may call for a more structured approach as dictated by your left brain.

That's how your brain processes information. And while your dominant brain hemisphere certainly contributes to the way you process information, there is also a style of learning, unrelated to your dominant hemisphere, that determines the ways in which you are best able to pick up information. When you're learning something new, your dominant brain hemisphere will want to take over. But there are times when the information being presented is not well suited to your dominant hemisphere's abilities.

That's why, in addition to your hemispheric dominance, you also have a style of learning that is dominant for you. Whether you know it or not, you are naturally predisposed to learning things visually, aurally, or through a combination of the two.

Your test results show that you are an auditory learner.

Other balanced-brained people who are auditory learners are pop singer Madonna, classical composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, and comedian and actor Robin Williams. But before delving deeper into how you learn, you should get the basics of your brain's physiology.

Your brain is made up of many different parts and is responsible for many different functions of your body. Because of this, it has adapted to be a very specialized organ. There are parts that control what you taste, what you feel, how you learn, how you think, and how you reason. All of this is so no one part gets overtaxed or worn out, and also so you can perform more than one task at a time.

Your brain stem controls your reflexes and involuntary functions such as breathing, heart rate, blood pressure, and digestion. Your cerebellum helps coordinate movement. Your hypothalamus controls body temperature and feeds behaviors like eating, drinking, aggression, and physical pleasure. Your cerebrum, or cerebral cortex, translates information transmitted from all of your sensing organs. It helps start motor functions, it controls emotions, and it is the center for all thinking, reasoning, learning, and memory. In short, it analyzes all information you feed to it.

The cerebral cortex is divided into two hemispheres. The left hemisphere is responsible for speech, controls the right side of your body, and serves as your logic and reasoning center. The right hemisphere governs your creativity and your athleticism among other things. In the past, people oversimplified this relationship.

People used to say if you were logical, you were definitely left-brained, and if you were creative, you were definitely right-brained. This is no longer the case. New research indicates that there's more flexibility when it comes to our gray matter. And if you know where your strengths and weaknesses lie, you can train your brain to become more organized, creative, or better able to process all sorts of information. Here's some general information on the differences between the left and right hemispheres.

Left hemisphere There's more to your left hemisphere than analytical strength. Your left hemisphere is involved in linear analytical processes, including processing word meanings and symbols, interpreting facts, and much of your language production and reception. When you look at a photograph or a painting, your left hemisphere is the one that orients on the logical, linear, and literal action in the picture, such as the storyline or the characters in the picture, as opposed to the more abstract or conceptual elements. Furthermore, when you hear a word, it is the left side that decodes that word's meaning, as opposed to something that word might remind you of. Overall, the left hemisphere is heavily involved in more reductionistic processes, such as breaking a picture into its constituent parts, as opposed to seeing it as a single and unified whole.

Right hemisphere Similarly, the right hemisphere is not just the seat of intuition. Perhaps it is more intuitively oriented than the left, but in most cases it also identifies patterns and performs spatial analyses. This hemisphere tends to process information in non-linear ways, looking at the whole instead of all the parts that make it up. When you look at a photograph or painting and notice the overall pattern or abstract contour of the image, it is your right hemisphere that is being activated. As another example, the right side looks at a spiral and sees a unified spiral pattern. Whereas the left side of your brain would see the series of lines making up the spiral and would interpret it in a holistic manner.