You already use both sides of your brain. Every healthy brain constantly shares information between its left and right hemispheres through a dense bridge of nerve fibers called the corpus callosum. The popular idea that some people are “left-brained” (logical) while others are “right-brained” (creative) is a myth. A 2013 University of Utah study scanned over 1,000 people, divided brain images into 7,000 regions, and found no evidence that individuals favor one hemisphere over the other. Both sides light up together regardless of personality type.
That said, the spirit of the question is worth taking seriously. What most people really want to know is how to think more flexibly, engage a wider range of cognitive skills, and strengthen the connections between brain regions. That’s entirely possible, and the strategies are surprisingly practical.
What “Both Sides” Actually Means
Certain functions do lean toward one hemisphere. Language processing tends to concentrate on the left side, while spatial awareness relies more heavily on the right. The left hemisphere controls the right side of your body, and vice versa. But no complex task, whether it’s writing a poem or solving an equation, happens in only one hemisphere. Creative work requires logic and structure. Analytical work requires intuition and pattern recognition. The real goal isn’t activating a “dormant” half of your brain. It’s strengthening the communication between hemispheres and developing cognitive skills you don’t normally exercise.
The corpus callosum, that bridge of nerve fibers connecting the two hemispheres, is the key structure here. A larger, more developed corpus callosum correlates with faster and richer information sharing between the left and right sides. And research shows this structure can physically grow in response to certain types of training, especially when that training starts early in life.
Learn a Musical Instrument
Playing music is one of the most thoroughly studied ways to increase connections between the two hemispheres. Musicians consistently show significant differences in the corpus callosum compared to non-musicians, with larger and more developed fibers in multiple segments. The effect is strongest for people who begin training before age seven, but it isn’t limited to childhood. Studies tracking children who received roughly 15 months of instrumental training found measurably greater development in the midbody of the corpus callosum compared to children who didn’t play an instrument. After about 29 months of practice, high-practicing children showed significantly larger cross-hemispheric connections than both low-practicing and non-musical peers.
Why is music so effective? It forces you to read notation, coordinate fine motor movements in both hands, listen and adjust in real time, and process rhythm and emotion simultaneously. Few other activities demand that many cognitive systems at once. Even picking up a ukulele or keyboard as an adult engages this same cross-hemispheric wiring.
Practice Cross-Body Movements
Any movement that crosses the midline of your body, meaning your right hand reaches to your left side or your left foot steps to the right, activates both hemispheres simultaneously. These are sometimes called cross-lateral or cross-crawl exercises, and they force the corpus callosum to coordinate between the two sides of the brain in real time.
Simple versions you can do anywhere:
- Standing cross-crawl: While standing, reach your left hand up and across to your right side, then alternate with your right hand crossing to the left. Repeat in a rhythmic pattern for 30 to 60 seconds.
- Opposite knee touches: Lift your right knee and tap it with your left hand, then switch. This is essentially marching in place with a twist.
- Seated midline crosses: Pretend you’re steering a wheel, turning left and then right, clapping between turns. The combination of crossing your midline with counting or clapping layers cognitive work on top of the physical movement.
These exercises are widely used in educational settings with children, but they work at any age. The principle is the same: when both sides of the body coordinate on a single task, both hemispheres have to communicate through the corpus callosum to get it done.
Use Your Non-Dominant Hand
Switching routine tasks to your non-dominant hand is one of the simplest ways to challenge your brain’s typical wiring. Brushing your teeth, stirring a pot, or writing a grocery list with your opposite hand feels awkward precisely because it activates neural pathways you rarely use. Research on handedness suggests that people with greater mixed-hand use show stronger interhemispheric interactions, particularly between the encoding processes on one side of the brain and the retrieval processes on the other.
You don’t need to become ambidextrous. Even short bursts of non-dominant hand use appear to stimulate the hemisphere that normally takes a back seat during fine motor tasks. Try it with low-stakes activities first: eating with a fork, opening doors, or scrolling your phone. The clumsiness is the point. It means your brain is building new connections.
Dance
Dancing combines physical coordination, spatial awareness, rhythm processing, and memory into a single activity. You have to remember choreography (or improvise it), stay aware of your body in space, move both sides of your body in coordinated patterns, and respond to music in real time. That’s a heavy workload spread across many brain regions and both hemispheres simultaneously.
Unlike repetitive cardio, dance constantly changes the demands on your brain. A new step sequence, a shift in tempo, or a partner’s unexpected movement all require rapid cognitive adjustment. This makes it one of the more complete “whole-brain” activities available, and it doesn’t require any special equipment or training to start.
Combine Physical and Cognitive Tasks
Dual-task training, where you perform a physical activity and a mental task at the same time, produces measurable cognitive benefits. A randomized controlled trial on exercise-cognitive dual-task training found that participants who combined movement with mental challenges scored significantly higher on cognitive assessments than a control group, with scores of 27.25 versus 23.47 on a standard cognitive screening tool. They also showed better physical performance and improved ability to handle cognitive load under pressure.
In practice, this can look like walking while doing mental math, balancing on one foot while naming items in a category, or doing yoga while listening to a language-learning app. The key is that both tasks should require genuine attention. Watching TV while on a treadmill doesn’t count in the same way because the physical task is automatic. The benefit comes from forcing your brain to allocate resources to two competing demands simultaneously.
Think in Different Modes Deliberately
Ned Herrmann, a researcher at General Electric, developed a model of thinking preferences that identified four distinct cognitive modes: analytical thinking (logic and data), practical thinking (organization and planning), relational thinking (empathy and collaboration), and experimental thinking (creativity and big-picture vision). Most people default to one or two of these modes and underuse the others.
You can practice engaging all four by deliberately shifting your approach to everyday problems. When you’re planning a project, don’t just make a spreadsheet (analytical and practical). Ask how the plan affects the people involved (relational) and brainstorm wild alternatives before settling on one (experimental). When you’re making a decision, notice which mode you jump to first, then force yourself to spend five minutes in each of the others before committing. This isn’t about brain hemispheres in a literal anatomical sense, but it builds the cognitive flexibility that people are really after when they search for ways to use “both sides” of their brain.
Why Variety Matters Most
The brain adapts to routine. Once a skill becomes automatic, it requires less neural effort and fewer cross-hemispheric connections to perform. The activities that strengthen your brain’s internal wiring are the ones that feel unfamiliar or slightly difficult. A professional pianist doesn’t get the same corpus callosum boost from playing scales that a beginner gets from learning their first chord. A seasoned dancer doesn’t benefit from a routine they’ve memorized as much as from learning an entirely new style.
The most effective long-term strategy is to keep rotating new challenges into your life. Learn an instrument for a year, then pick up a new language. Take a dance class in a style you’ve never tried. Write with your left hand for a week. Combine physical exercise with mental puzzles. Each new challenge forces your brain to recruit wider networks and build fresh connections between regions that don’t normally work together. That, far more than any left-brain/right-brain framework, is what genuine whole-brain engagement looks like.