Chapter Fourteen of Prophets of PsychoHeresy II
Gary Smalley and Dr. John Trent:
Right-Brain/Left Brain Pseudoscience
(The following is excerpted from the book Prophets of PsychoHeresy II
by Martin and Deidre Bobgan,
which is now out-of-print.)
~~~~
Gary Smalley has a bachelor's degree in psychology;
John Trent has a Ph. D. in marriage and family counseling.
Both have gone to seminary and therefore serve as "good" examples of amalgamania.
Amalgamania is the title of one of the chapters of our book
PsychoHeresy.1
By amalgamania we mean the zealous practice of integrating psychology
and the Bible in order to help people better understand their problems
and to provide solutions for them. Actually all of the psychologists we discuss
are amalgamators, but the ones who have theological training as well as
psychological training are most culpable.
Smalley and Trent have written a number of books.
One of their books, titled
The Language of Love,2
is published and promoted by Focus on the Family.
This book is another example of what Dobson supports and promotes.
Smalley and Trent discuss this book with Dobson on his radio broadcast.
The title of the broadcast is "Learning to Communicate."3
On the broadcast Dobson strongly supports and endorses
The Language of Love
and the work of Smalley and Trent. The information given on the broadcast
is similar to that in the book.
In
The Language of Love Smalley and Trent present a technique
which utilizes "word pictures."
On the radio broadcast Smalley says:
It's a language method where, for example, a woman can say basically
whatever she wants to her husband and he'll not only understand her instantly,
but he'll literally be able to feel her feelings."4
If you read this last statement carefully, word for word, you will see
that it contains an extreme promise. Is the promise true?
We shall see.
Smalley and Trent tell us that to communicate effectively with others
we must paint a picture in their minds by using stories. They indicate
that word pictures are found throughout Scripture and that
"word pictures tap into the right side of the brain."5
Their system is based upon what they believe to be scientific information
about the two hemispheres of the brain. But, as we shall show, their techniques
are built upon a false foundation and should therefore be ignored.
Smalley and Trent's theme is that males are mostly left-brained
and females are mostly right-brained.
They say:
What occurs in the womb merely sets the stage for men and women
to "specialize" in two different ways of thinking. . . . The left brain houses
more of the logical, analytical, factual, and aggressive centers of thought.
It's the side of the brain most men reserve for the majority of their waking hours. . . .
On the other hand, most women spend the majority of their days and nights
camped out on the right side of the brain. It's the side that harbors the center
for feelings, as well as the primary relational, language, and communication skills;
enables them to do fine-detail work; sparks imagination; and makes an afternoon
devoted to art and fine music actually enjoyable.6
They also say:
If a woman truly expects to have meaningful communication with her husband,
she must activate the right side of his brain. And if a man truly wants to communicate
with his wife; he must enter her world of emotion.7 (Emphasis theirs.)
Many Christians believe in the right-brain/left-brain pseudoscience.
They followed in the wake of the first flush of false teaching generated
by incomplete findings having to do with persons with brain damage.
Then without further ado, they embrace the implications, label them science,
use them to support their own ideas, and bring them right into the church.
Nobelist Dr. Roger Sperry says, "The left-right dichotomy . . .
is an idea with which it is easy to run wild."8
Sperry also says:
The more we learn, the more we recognize the unique complexity
of any one individual intellect and the stronger the conclusion becomes
that the individuality inherent in our brain networks makes that of fingerprints
or facial features gross and simple by comparison.9
Dr. Michael Gazzaniga, in a book titled
The Social Brain,
has a chapter titled "Left-Brain, Right-Brain Mania: A Debunking."
He says:
Where does all of this conjecture come from?
How did some laboratory findings of limited generality
get so outrageously misinterpreted? Why were they picked up
so hungrily by the press and then embraced by every sort
of scientific dilettante?
There are several reasons. The left-brain/right-brain dichotomy
was simple and understandable and provided a way to talk about
modern brain research and how it applied to everyday experience.
Certainly no one was going to argue that people have artistic-intuitive skills
and logical-linguistic skills. Prima facie there are manifestly different activities
of mind. So science is used to prove that one set of skills is in the left brain
and another in the right, which in turn proves that mental skills are different,
and therefore able to be differentially trained. The image of one part of the brain
doing one thing and the other part something entirely different was there,
and that it was a confused concept seemed to make no difference. . . .
The runaway fervor for such ideas relates, in part, to the difficulty
in communicating scientific ideas to the general public.
To really understand concepts arising out of experimental data
is a serious business, and most people do not have the time
or interest to assess information at that level. There is an extensive
and usually foreign vocabulary to learn. The necessary qualifying
remarks and constraints on the ideas prove to be too much of a burden
for the potential audience. So scientific journalism purveys its stories
on simple-to-understand claims that most people can relate to,
preferably at a personal level. This wouldn't matter for the present story
except for the fact that the distortions get in the way of why split-brain patients
are truly interesting. And the oversimplifications and outright erroneous information
have also tended to trivialize the complexity of the integrated processes
of our minds.10 (Emphasis added.)
In conclusion to the chapter, Gazzaniga says:
By the late 1960s and early 1970s the realization was spreading that the
simple dichotomies of that time did little to advance knowledge about how cognitive
systems work. Neuropsychology was at risk. Isolating mental systems or claiming
that isolated mental systems process information differently does not really
illuminate the nature of cognition.11
Christians as well as non-Christians use the hemispheres
to describe personality types. The so-called left-brain person
is thought to be linear, logical, analytical, and unemotional;
and the right-brained person is thought to be spatial, creative, mystical,
intuitive, and emotional. While such adjectives may describe people
to various degrees during various activities and in different work or social
situations, this certainly is no basis for knowing or understanding an individual.
However, personality typologies are always popular
even though they are as spurious as the astrological signs.
While brain research has shown some particular areas of strengths
of one hemisphere over the other, Dr. Georg Deutsch of the University
of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston says that "differences within
a hemisphere account for more than differences between them."12
Neurologist Dr. John Mazziotta at the UCLA School of Medicine says:
Even on the most trivial tasks our studies showed that everything in the brain
was in flux----both sides, the front and back, the top and bottom. It was tremendously
complicated. To think that you could reduce this to a simple left-right dichotomy
would be misleading and oversimplified.13 (Emphasis added.)
And while each hemisphere may specialize in certain activities,
the only clear-cut function which only one side seems to have is related to speaking.
The left hemisphere seems to control the muscles of the vocal tract.
And that has to do with muscle control instead of emotional or cognitive functions.14
While Smalley claims that emotions are right-brain activities,
they involve both hemispheres, though each hemisphere
"seems to be more in control of different subsets of emotions,
the left hemisphere being biased toward the positive and
the right toward the negative emotions."15
Dr. Jerre Levy, a biopsychologist at the University of Chicago, contends:
The two-brain myth was founded on an erroneous premise:
that since each hemisphere was specialized, each must function
as an independent brain. But in fact, just the opposite is true.
To the extent that regions are differentiated in the brain, they must
integrate their activities. Indeed, it is precisely that integration that
gives rise to behavior and mental processes greater than and different
from each region's contribution. Thus, since the central premise
of the mythmakers is wrong, so are all the inferences derived from it.16
(Emphasis added)
We are not surprised when the whole world is deceived.
Nor are we shocked when New Age promoters use the pseudoscience
of brain hemisphere dichotomy to give a semblance of substance
to their desires to market intuition, creativity, visualization, and mystical experience.
What we are concerned about is Christians embracing and enthusiastically teaching
myth as fact. We are alarmed when those who purport to speak for God
use such "science falsely so-called" (1 Timothy 6:20)
and "philosophies and vain deceit, after the tradition of men,
after the rudiments of the world, and not after Christ" (Colossians 2:8).
In his article titled "Neurobabble," Dr. Laurence Miller says:
Brain research will continue to make genuine contributions to the quality
of life, but it will be by way of an understanding and respect for the complex
facts of neuroscience, not through the simplistic and potentially misleading
efforts of the current crop of whole-brain half-wittedness.17
Rather than checking the accuracy of statements about right and left brain research
and conclusions, too many have moved into the never never land of fantasy.
Not only are their assumptions erroneous from a logical point of view;
they have no support in Scripture.
Specifically Smalley and Trent not only promote left-brained, right-brained pseudoscience,
but they also declare that men are mostly left-brained and women are mostly right brained.
They say: "Specifically, medical studies have shown that between the eighteenth
and twenty-sixth week of pregnancy, something happens that forever separates the sexes."18
Their footnote refers to a book by Dr. Richard Restak titled The Brain, page 43.
In checking this out we found nothing on page 43 which would support this statement.
We are not saying that the statement does not exist, only that it does not exist
where they say it does. However, Restak, the author of the book quoted by Smalley
and Trent, does say: "Although distinct anatomical differences between the brains
of men and women are strongly
suspected, no convincing proof has been found."19
(Emphasis added.)
In addition Restak says:
. . . . no one has as yet convincingly demonstrated an anatomic difference
between the brain structures of human males and females. These behavioral
differences may be the result of chemical changes in brain function resulting
from the influence of sex hormones in early prenatal development.20
Compare the above statement with what Smalley and Trent say.
Restak is saying that there may or may not be "an anatomic difference
between the brain structures of human males and females."
Also, sex differences may or may not "be the result of chemical changes
in brain function resulting from the influence of sex hormones in early
prenatal development."
Beryl Lieff Benderly is a contributing editor of
Psychology Today
and author of
The Myth of Two Minds: What Gender Means and Doesn't Mean.
In a section titled "Making too Much of Too Little," Benderly discusses the fact that
the gender differences in spatial and verbal abilities are small.
She says:
Anne Fausto-Sterling, a medical sciences professor at Brown University,
notes that male and female spatial and verbal abilities in fact constitute "majorly
overlapping curves. It is absolutely false, just wrong" to claim that either
sex's performance is always better than the other. "More than half the time
there's no difference."
What's more, "the variation from one woman to another woman,
or one man to another man, is much larger than the average difference
between the sexes," says University of Chicago biopsychology professor
Jerre Levy, whose main area of research is the differences and interactions
between the left and right sides of the brain. "Naturally occurring individual
differences among people are just huge."21
Dr. Anne Fausto-Sterling examines some of the purported differences
between men and women in her book
Myths of Gender.
She says that the differences in verbal and spatial skills are quite small.
In explaining that she says:
. . . if one looks at the variation (from lowest to highest performance)
of spatial ability in a mixed population of males and females, 5 percent of it
at most can be accounted for on the basis of sex. The other 95 percent of the
variation is due to individual differences that have nothing to do with being
male or female.22
Because of more differences existing between persons within one gender than
between males and females, Dr. Ruth Bleier, in her book
Science and Gender,
says:
. . . whatever characteristic is being measured, the range of variation
is far greater among males or among females than between the two sexes.
There is, in fact, far greater scientific and perhaps social justification for exploring
and trying to understand the vast variance among individuals than the elusive,
tiny variances between the sexes that elicit far greater attention and expenditure
of research resources than they merit."23
And, Benderly makes a valid statistical point when she says:
And, finally, a finding of statistical significance doesn't mean that
a difference is large enough to have any practical effect; it merely discounts
chance as a cause.24
Dr. Sally Springer and Dr. Georg Deutsch, in a book titled
Left Brain, Right Brain,
discuss the various research studies and available information on split-brain research
as it applies to the two hemispheres of the brain.
They say:
Our review of data from split-brain subjects has led us to the conclusion
that hemispheric specialization is not an all-or-none phenomenon but, rather,
falls on a continuum.25
In their conclusion regarding sex differences, Springer and Deutsch say:
There is a great deal of overlap in the distribution of ability across
men and women. Some women have better spatial abilities than most men,
while some men have better verbal skills than most women.26
Dr. Elaine Showalter is the author of
The Female Malady. She says,
"Surely the rising star of body parts in the 1980s is the right brain."27
Further she says: "The right-brain school represents post-Aquarian
fascination with alternative, especially Oriental, ways of knowing,
and with androgyny." She refers to how some have accused
Western society of being left-brained and overlooking the
"intuitive mystical right brain" and says:
In the 1980's, pop psychologists have capitalized on these
metaphysical speculations to market the right brain as a new target
of opportunity like the G-spot. However out of shape, they tell us,
your right brain can be pumped up in mental aerobics.
The whole-brain pop industry is still perpetuating outrageous
stereotypes in pseudo-scientific vocabulary.28
An example is a recent advertisement for a book titled
Right Brain Sex.29
Because of the exploitation connected to misinformation promoted in such
"pseudo-scientific vocabulary," Showalter believes that people need to be
warned that "the functions of the brain's hemispheres, like other kinds
of division of labor, are likely to be far more complicated than the simple,
seductive division into left and right can explain."30 Unfortunately for many
Christians, when Smalley and Trent employ "pseudo-scientific vocabulary"
they give credence to ideas and practices that oppose the truth of God's Word.
There is no indication in Scripture of a woman's brain being superior
to a man's brain.
Furthermore, the man is to be the head of the woman
just as Christ is the head of the church (I Corinthians 11:3).
{my emphasis. ~greg}
While this is not a position of a superior brain; neither would it be
a position of an inferior brain. It is also amazing to imagine that
the Psalms could have been written by men who were, by Smalley and
Trent's reasoning, affectively defective. The Psalms and Song of Solomon
reveal a great variety of the feelings both felt and expressed by men.
After interviewing several researchers in the field, Kevin McKean says:
The problem arises when the right-brain movement implies that its
conclusions are based on hard fact, rather than an essentially metaphorical
interpretation of scientific discoveries. The differences between
the hemispheres are still not well understood, and Gazzaniga, like Springer,
says that the newest research tends to emphasize the way the two cooperate
with one another during the normal functioning, rather than how they differ.31
McKean also says:
Scientists are understandably annoyed when they see careful
but often inconclusive work popularized and exploited so glibly.
As Deutsch puts it: "I get bothered by people saying,
'This is all based on neurological theory, therefore it's true.'
It's not legitimized by neurological theory. There is no evidence
that people favor one portion of the brain or the other
----that's pure speculation."32 (Emphasis added)
This same right-brain female/left-brain male nonsense is promoted by Dobson
in an interview with Dr. Donald Joy. Smalley and Trent credit Joy as being
the source of their right/left brain information. Joy is introduced as
"a good friend and frequent visitor to Focus on the Family." The title
of the program is "The Innate Differences between Males and Females."
During the broadcast Joy promotes some of the same pseudoscience.
Joy says:
The female brain is a brain that's not damaged during fetal development
as the male brain is. . . .The damage occurs to the male brain during the sixteenth
to the twenty-sixth week of fetal development. At that time a chemical bath is given
to the left hemisphere and the connecting link between the two hemispheres
that reduces the size and number of transmission passages that exist there
for what's called lateral transmission. So males simply can't talk to themselves
across the hemispheres in a way that a woman does.33
A similar statement is made by another one of Dobson's favorites,
H. Norman Wright, on a different Focus on the Family interview.
Wright is a former pastor turned psychologist who packages and
prolifically promotes psychology. In the interview Wright says:
One of the unique differences between men and women
is that women use both sides of their brain at the same time
because of the thousands of additional nerve connectors that are there.
Men have to shift from one side of the brain to the other.
They're working out of the analytical, the left side, and if they have to move into
the emotional area they drop that and move toward the right side. . . . Men tend
to be single minded. They get involved in one thing. And women have more of
a capability of juggling.34
What Joy and Wright say is similar to what Smalley and Trent say:
The human brain is divided into two halves, or hemispheres, connected by
fibrous tissue called the corpus callosum. The sex-related hormones and
chemicals that flood a baby boy's brain cause the right side to recede slightly,
destroying some of the connecting fibers. One result is that, in most cases,
a boy starts life more left-brain oriented.
Because little girls don't experience this chemical bath, they leave the starting
blocks much more two-sided in their thinking.35
In contrast, researchers Dr. Melissa Hines and Dr. Roger Gorski, from the Department
of Anatomy at the University of California at Los Angeles, say:
As is true of most behavioral and neural sex differences in people,
sex differences in asymmetries are small. . . .. . . sex differences in neural
asymmetries appear to be very complex. One sex is not simply more lateralized
than the other. Rather, males seem to be more lateralized than females in some
respects; females seem to be more lateralized than males in other respects;
and the sexes seem to be equally lateralized in still other respects.36
What has happened with Smalley and Trent, as well as with Joy and Wright,
is that they dichotomize differences in a way that the research does
not permit.
Smalley, Trent, Joy, and Wright, with Dobson's support and advertising, promote
the type of left-brain/right-brain popular pseudoscience that the researchers
oppose. They claim differences that do not exist and they ignore overlapping
distributions that do exist. The misinformation and disinformation by such
popularizers of right-brain/left-brain mythology are a disservice to the church.
Hemisphericity and gender differences are far more complex than the
pseudo-pop-neurology propagated by Smalley, Trent, Joy, Wright, and Dobson.
Dobson's support of such error is one more link in the chain of his psychoheresy.
Brain research and the results of research are in a constant state of flux.
In reading the research, we see more
suggestions of
possible
conclusions than assertions of actual conclusions, more "it appears as if" than "it is so"
proclamations, as made by Smalley, Trent, Joy, Wright and Dobson.
Some feminists seem bent on proving that there are no differences.
And, other popularizers of pseudoscience, such as Smalley, Trent, Joy, Wright,
and Dobson, seem bent on propagating differences that have not been proven.
Underlying their unjustifiable conclusions seems to be a female brain superiority
which certainly appeals to the women who follow them.*
While the research seems to support some differences, they are
not the ones Smalley, Trent, Joy, Wright, and Dobson are promoting.
Notice our expression "research seems." Whenever individuals speak
with the certainty of these men in such an uncertain area, caveat emptor!
(Buyer, beware!)
* Al Dager has written a
Media Spotlight Report titled "Gary Smalley:
The Psychology of Matriarchy." In the report Dager discusses Smalley and Trent's
book
The Language of Love as well as two of Smalley's books titled
If He Only Knew and
For Better or for Best. The Special Report
is available upon request from Media Spotlight Ministries,
P.O. Box 290, Redmond, WA 98073-0290.
1. Martin and Deidre Bobgan. PsychoHeresy:
The Psychological Seduction of Christianity. Santa Barbara, CA:
EastGate Publishers, 1987.
2. Gary Smalley and John Trent. The Language of Love. Pomona, CA:
Focus on the Family Publishing, 1988.
3. Gary Smalley, John Trent and James Dobson, "Learning to Communicate,"
Focus on the Family Radio Broadcast, CS 423.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid., side 2.
6. Smalley and Trent, The Language of Love, op. cit., p. 36.
7. Ibid., p. 42.
8. Roger Sperry, "Some Effects of Disconnecting the Cerebral Hemispheres."
Science, Vol. 217, 24 September 1982, p. 1225.
9. Ibid.
10. Michael S. Gazzaniga. The Social Brain: Discovering the Networks of the Mind.
New York: Basic Books, Inc., Publishers, 1985, pp. 48-49.
11. Ibid.
12. George Deutsch quoted by Kevin McKean, "Of Two Minds: Selling the Right Brain,"
Discover, 1985, p. 38.
13. John Mazziotta quoted by Kevin McKean, ibid.
14. Terence Hines. Pseudoscience and the Paranormal. Buffalo:
Prometheus Books, 1988, pp. 298-299.
15. Ibid., p. 300.
16. Jerre Levy, "Right Brain, Left Brain: Fact and Fiction."
Psychology Today, May 1985, p. 43.
17. Laurence Miller, "Neurobabble." Psychology Today, April 1986, p. 72.
18. Smalley and Trent, The Language of Love, op. cit., p. 35.
19. Richard M. Restak. The Brain. New York: Bantam Books, 1984, p. 245.
20. Ibid., p. 244.
21. Beryl Lieff Benderly, "Don't Believe Everything You Read. . . ."
Psychology Today, November 1989, p. 68.
22. Anne Fausto-Sterling. Myths of Gender. New York: Basic Books, Inc.,
Publishers, 1985, p. 33.
23. Ruth Bleier. Science and Gender. New York: Pergamon Press, 1984, p. 109.
24. Benderly, op. cit., p. 68.
25. Sally P. Springer and Georg Deutsch. Left Brain, Right Brain.
New York: W. H. Freeman and Company, 1985, p. 64.
26. Ibid., p. 185.
27. Elaine Showalter, book review of Medicine, Mind, and the Double Brain
by Anne Harrington. New York Times Book Review,
October 11, 1987, p. 39.
28. Ibid., p. 69.
29. Carol G. Wells. Right Brain Sex. Prentice Hall Press.
(Advertised in the Los Angeles Times/Book Review.)
30. Showalter, op. cit., p. 69.
31. Kevin McKean, op. cit,., p. 40.
32. Ibid.
33. Donald Joy interview, "The Innate Differences between Males and Females,"
Focus on the Family Radio Broadcast, CS-099,
1984, 1986.
34. H. Norman Wright interview, "Understanding the Man in Your Life."
Focus on the Family Radio Broadcast, CS 374.
35. Smalley and Trent, The Language of Love, op. cit., p. 35.
36. Melissa Hines and Roger Gorski, ""Hormonal Influences on the Development
of Neural Asymmetries." The Dual Brain. New
York: The Guilford Press, 1985, pp. 79, 80.
Copyright © 1990 Martin and Deidre Bobgan
Published by EastGate Publishers Santa Barbara, California
Web site:
http://www.psychoheresy-aware.org
] movie at her house, and the three of us did it together rather briefly, with differing inflections... and I could hear the potential for it.
. He seems to have already begun 
.