Although scientists have long understood that the left hemisphere houses the brain’s language center, recent studies have provided evidence of the right brain’s role in certain language processing situations, specifically those involving metaphors, idioms, humor, irony, ambiguity, connotations, and finding the solution to insight problems.
In one project, Faust and her team investigated which side of the brain is responsible for interpreting poetic metaphor. By combining the traditional observational approach with the measurement of real-time brain activity, they discovered that when metaphors were presented separately to each brain hemisphere, the left brain often interpreted as nonsensical what the right brain saw as meaningful.
The converging evidence from behavioral, ERP and fMRI experiments suggests that the right hemisphere plays a unique role in processing novel metaphoric expressions taken from poetry, and that in terms of brain activity, prose and poetry are significantly different from one another. This is consistent with theories that postulate a predominantly right hemisphere processing of distant semantic relationship and nonsalient meanings.
In addition, the results of research conducted in Faust’s lab may have some implications for the right hemisphere’s contribution to specific processes underlying verbal creativity. For example, one aspect of creative thinking involves associating remote elements (“imagination” and “caves”) into a novel but useful (interpretable) combination.
