Page 199 - A Mind For Numbers: How to Excel at Math and Science

The arrow on this CT scan of the brain points toward the shadowed damage caused by a right-
hemisphere ischemic stroke.

Avoiding Overconfidence

There’s a great deal of evidence from research that the right hemisphere helps us
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step back and put our work into big-picture perspective. People with damage to
the right hemisphere are often unable to gain “aha!” insights. That’s why Fred
wasn’t able to catch the punch lines of jokes. The right hemisphere, it turns out,
is vitally important in getting onto the right track and doing “reality checks.” 4
In some sense, when you whiz through a homework or test problem and
don’t go back to check your work, you are acting a little like a person who is

refusing to use parts of your brain. You’re not stopping to take a mental breath
and then revisit what you’ve done with the bigger picture in mind, to see
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whether it makes sense. As leading neuroscientist V. S. Ramachandran has
noted, the right hemisphere serves as a sort of “‘Devil’s Advocate,’ to question
the status quo and look for global inconsistencies,” while “the left hemisphere
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always tries to cling tenaciously to the way things were.” This echoes the
pioneering work of psychologist Michael Gazzaniga, who posited that the left