Tanya Lewis, LiveScience Staff Writer
Date: 23 April 2013 Time: 07:01 PM ET
The two halves of the human brain are not symmetrical. This lopsidedness, which arises during brain development, may be a stamp of the adaptability of the human brain, a new study suggests.
Researchers compared geometric differences between brain scans of humans and chimpanzees. They observed structural asymmetries in both human and chimpanzee brains, but human brains were especially asymmetric. The findings, published online today (April 23) in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B, suggest human and chimp brains evolved a high degree of flexibility during development.
The human brain is known to be asymmetric — the "left brain" is involved in language processing, for example, while the "right brain" is where spatial reasoning takes place. "It's very common that there are some areas that are bigger in the left hemisphere than in the right hemisphere," said lead study author Aida Gómez-Robles, an anthropologist at The George Washington University in Washington, D.C.
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