Your brain is an organ of two halves – the left side and the right side. And there are many brain functions, such as language skills or which hand you write with, which are organised mostly in one side of the brain or the other.
Simple behavioural tests have now allowed us to see how this organisation is revealed through biases in how we see and interact with the world – and each other – often without us being aware of it.
Examining how people perceive a diagram of variously orientated lines and angles provided clues that people typically have a subconscious bias for seeing things set out in clockwise orientations.
We then realised that this might also be related to a number of physical instincts that people have, such as which way they turn their heads. After looking at recent research in visual psychophysics and visual neuroscience, we saw various perceptual and behavioral phenomena in which humans can have a directional bias.
Many of these turning behaviours are seen early in life. For example, infants have an initial bias for turning the head to the right (and consequently extending the left arm outward to compensate for that movement).
Some previous research found that such an instinctive turn to the right extends to adulthood – when an adult kisses another on the lips, their heads tend to automatically lean to the right. But is this an extension of the bias that humans are born with, or do people simply learn to kiss that way?
Why most of us lean to the right when we kiss