What is Big Think?    We are Big Idea Hunters…      Big Think
Features:  12,000+ Expert Videos    Watch videos  World Renowned
Bloggers    Go to blogs  Big Think Edge    Find out more  A Tale
of Two Brains, Coherent and Unified  April 13, 2013, 11:44 AM
In the early part of my career I studied patients who had their
two brains disconnected. So the left brain was disconnected from
the right. There is a big nerve track that connects them in you
and me and that was sectioned by neurosurgeons in order to
prevent the spread of epilepsy.  What we were responsible for
was working out the functions of each hemisphere. With the two
hemispheres connected you could work with them independent of
the other influencing it.  So we got to study it alone and over
many, many years the basic finding was that one brain didn’t
know what the other one was doing. And moreover, each hemisphere
has a set of specializations.  We suspected, and it turned out
to be true, that the left hemisphere is the language and speech
hemisphere. 