It's clear from moment to moment that each of us requires the use of all of our brain's varied, functional areas. It's also clear that in the case of a pathology of sorts, that neuro-plasticity can enable the recovery of skills lost by using other areas of the brain.
However, what most of the literature I've read on this topic fails to see is time as a variable. Clearly, we have a 'preference' toward a particular perception of the world. Some people write lists, others enjoy working with numbers, etc. Both can do both, but one activity feels 'easier' for them.
We must surmise that the brain has 'efficiencies' or 'preferences' that form the basis of our personality styles.
2600 years of literature and commentary, demonstrating that there are four recurrent patterns of default behaviour in human beings, must have a physiological basis.
We also know that people can develop skills in areas of life, and of the brain, that are beyond their preferences. Whom you were as a child is likely to be different than whom you are as an adult, if your working life requires you to learn and act within a broad spectrum of skills. When we see studies that take a 'snapshot' of an individual and attempt to determine a conclusion, they're doing so at the expense of a bigger picture including time, context and skills.
The model I've rested upon, as being the most useful for describing the physiological basis of psychological type or cognitive style, takes time, skills development, arousal set-point, emotional tone and falsification of type into account.
The proof of the pudding is in the eating.
After ten years of learning about this model, trying to prove it wrong and right, and teaching it in the adult, corporate classroom, it has proven itself to be robust and uniquely descriptive of human behavior.
It has many questions that remain unanswered. The main question is the exact nature of the efficiency that lends itself to our local, cortical preference for filtering information and our response. Richard Haier's work is the closest I've come to an explanation of this.
I completely agree that the sensationalism around headlines that put articles such as this in the common vernacular is tremendously harmful and regressive. While they serve as reminders for practitioners to keep on their toes, keep learning and stay in contact with the latest research, they send the lay person into a maze of confusion because of their 'claims'.
If you can predict with any certainty what is going to happen next, and can describe with no prior knowledge of the individual, what is likely to have been their experience to date, surely it follows that the model you're using has validity.
The model I use shows four discreet regions as predispositions for learning and filtering the world. It goes beyond cortical asymmetry into quadratic asymmetry, suggesting that the central sulcus / lateral fissure, dividing the Frontal Lobes to the sensory cortex, has just as much of a connective/restrictive role (via the two arcuate fasciculi) as the corpus calossum does between left and right. If we take Iain McGilchrist's very useful explanation of the inhibitory role that these white matter connections play, we can see that the brain needs all areas, simultaneously connecting, to function. However, we also see that quieting one area to allow another to take centre stage is a function of the brain's architecture.
Why and how this happens are beyond my understanding. I've only spend the last ten years reading around this topic, and the eight before it around the general psychological type literature. Without a medical degree and specialism in neurology or near-psychology to boot, I remain an avid reader of anything I can get my hands on that explains why we default to certain behaviors. For now, the work of Dr Katherine Benziger is so accurate that I cannot find anything to match it.
From my classroom experiences with executive talent across multiple industries, since 1997, and with this particular 'preferred cognitive style' knowledge since 2005, I can say that there is absolutely a preference between right and left, and that this moves to front and back as well.
I welcome comments and questions to help me learn further.
Daryle