“The brain is a mysterious thing,” says Biddulph. “We’ve only been able to see how it works in the last few years because of MRI, which is the scanning technique that can watch it in action. Before that, we had to rely only on people with brain damage to work out in reverse what they could or couldn’t do. Neuroscience is now the biggest field in medicine as we race to discover how we actually work.”

We know that the human brain has evolved to have two sides, or hemispheres, which are clearly visible from scans. Previously, scientists and psychologists believed that these halves operated separately, with the left side responsible for reason and thinking, and the right side concerned with emotion. However, Biddulph explains that this may not be quite true.

“We’ve always known that the brain has two halves, and for a while back in the 1970s people thought our emotions lived on one side (sometimes referred to as the ‘feminine side’) and rational thinking lived on the other,” he tells Strong Women. “But the work of British neuroscientist Iain McGilchrist, and many others around the world, has created a huge paradigm shift in understanding how our minds, and brains, work.”

Let’s dig into how our left and right brains work.

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