Asymmetric wagging
Humans aren’t the only ones who use different brain hemispheres for different purposes. Turns out that dogs do the same. Just watch their tails. In an intriguing experiment reported in the SciAm blog, Italian researchers found that a dog typically “wags the tail more to the right while greeting its owner but more to the left when meeting an unfamiliar dominant dog.” Because dog brains, like people brains, are “contralateral,” (See Chapter 1 of AWNM), that means a rightward wag shows activation in the left hemisphere, and a leftward wag shows activation in the right hemisphere. The study is further evidence of the hemispheric division of labor in all animals, including us. As SciAm puts it, “Left brain for routine, right brain for oddities and emergencies.”
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