A couple of weeks ago, I ((and most of the blogosphere)) linked to a cool optical illusion of a spinning dancer. At the time, I didn’t realize that people were interpreting this as a “left brain vs. right brain” thing, but apparently they were. Now ScienceLine has a nice piece by Jeremy Hsu called Does the “Right Brain vs. Left Brain” Spinning Dancer Test Work? in which he takes a crack at the pop-science notion of left vs. right brain:

If the test sounds flawed, that’s not just because one shouldn’t use spinning dancers to characterize their brain strengths. Rather, the test is coming up inaccurate because it provides a crude view of the “lateralization of brain function,” or the concept that each side of the human brain specializes in certain mental activities.