Workout for a Balanced Brain [antikvár]

Foreword^Dr. Roger SperryHis split-brain research forms the basis of our understanding of brain-hemisphere functions.In 1981 American psychologist Roger Sperry was awarded a Nobel Prize in medicine for his discoveries concerning the functional specialization of the cerebral hemispheres. He and his colleagues had carried cut a remarkable series of experiments on patients who had undergone brain surgery for epilepsy that was difficult to treat.To stop the seizures from spreading, neurosurgeons cut the corpus callosumthe bridge of millions of nerve fibers that connects the two hemispheres of the brain and allows them to communicate with each other. After the operation, these patients lacked the ability to transfer information from one side of the brain to the other. Only the hemisphere that directly received a stimulus could process it.When a picture was shown to one of these patients In such a way that the information reached only the left hemisphere, she could describe what she saw. But when the same image was presented to the right hemisphere, the patient denied seeing anything. Astonishingly though, when asked to point out an object similar to the one in the projected image, she could do so without difficulty.It was clear that the right side of the brain had seen the picture and had recognized It. What It couldn't do was talk about what It had seen. As the experiments continued, they revealed much more about how the two sides of the brain were specialized to perform different intellectual tasks. The left hemisphere excelled at language, speech, and logic; the right hemisphere at pattern recognition, music, and emotion.