Brain Dominance Theory

Dew (1996) regards left and right-brained thinking as being linked to the brain dominance theory. Left-brained thinkers emphasize rationality, data and analytics in their thinking. Right-brained people tend to solve problems through their understanding of relationships, embrace teamwork and look at things as a process. The two sides of the brain, therefore, can both play a role in problem-solving, but the approach to problem-solving can be substantially different. At times, these styles will be complementary but at other times they will be incompatible.

A mind map is a visual way of representing thinking. It can be used as a brainstorming approach, and perhaps even to solve problems. I am skeptical that a mind map makes use of brain dominance theory, however. Mind maps are maybe good for people who need to see or visualize things in order to conceptualize them. I'm not sure which side that would appeal to, probably right-brained.

To me, what that says is that the mind map is developed as a way of helping a specific subset of people to perform brainstorming, problem-solving and other similar thinking tasks. This does not leverage anything of brain dominance theory and could have been developed entirely independent of it. There's no apparently correlation, much less causation, between these two concepts. That's not to dismiss either -- just that there is no evident relationship between the two, that can be empirically demonstrated.

As for an example of a mind map I have used, I would not ever use a mind map. When I look at that, I see a cluttered jumble that goes nowhere. My head hurts just looking at one. I'm just not that visual, and don't conceptualize things that way. Good to know for somebody else, and that there's a tool for them, but I don't have a mind map, never used one, and wouldn't know where to begin if I did.

Again, though, if you want to draw a link between mind maps and brain dominance theory, you need evidence that such a link exists. So I went to look for this. Tony Buzan (2010) discusses this in a video from his website, where he notes that the cells in a brain look like a mind map, with the different links that they have to each other.

So he developed mind mapping based on this principle that people's brains are wired a certain way, such that the brain responds well to information that is structured in roughly the same way -- so a student's notebook with scribbles and lines and a lack of structure actually helped them to remember and understand concepts, which Buzan takes to mean that's how the brain works.

Now, at issue here is that Buzan has determined the mind map to be universal, which tells us that the concept of mind maps rejects brain dominance theory. Brain dominance theory holds that some people are left-brained and others right-brained, yet mind-mapping as a construct is based on the idea that the entire brain is linked; no such divisions exist. Further, if such divisions exist, mind mapping is still rooted in the idea that every brain is universal, which is the opposite of what is implied in brain dominance theory.

Left brained people's way of thinking, often depicted as quite linear in brain dominance literature, is not even recognized as existing in Buzan's explanation of where he got the idea for mind-mapping from. So based on the evidence, the two ideas are, more or less, mutually exclusive. Mind mapping is designed on the assumption that all brains are alike, and apparently that they all work on the right-brained platform. Mind-mapping is about drawing bubbles and lines. That's about as much as I can determine.

To me, it's a mess and doesn't seem compatible with clear thought at all. If anything, it stats with a simple.