People sometimes describe those of us who are more creative as being “right-brained,” and those who are more logical as “left-brained.” This became a very popular idea about how the brain works. But it isn’t really true.

The theory about left and right brains emerged from work that started in the 1950s.

Roger Sperry was a neuroscientist at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. He got curious about how the two sides of the brain interact. He focused on a thick bundle of nerve fibers that joins the two halves. It’s called the corpus callosum and in people it contains more than 200 million nerve fibers.

Sperry asked these volunteers to cover one eye at a time. Then he showed them a series of words. The people could only recall words they viewed with their right eyes, not their left. When shown objects, people could draw things they saw with their left eyes but could not describe them in words.

In fact, this early research had one huge limitation: Scientists back then had no way to look inside a living brain.

In 2013, researchers used MRI to scan the brains of more than 1,000 kids and young adults. They measured whether some brain functions seemed isolated to the left or right sides. And a few functions were tied more strongly to one side, these scans showed. Among them was language, which supported Sperry’s findings from decades earlier. But most brain networks bounced between both hemispheres.

Some functions are controlled more by regions on one side of the brain than the other. But traits like creativity and logic are far too complex to use just one brain area. In fact, any time you create a painting or solve a math problem, lots of areas on both sides of the brain team up. So the next time a quiz or a friend tells you that you’re “left-brained“ or “right-brained,” remember: You have your whole brain to thank for all the amazing things you can do.