Two Heads Are Better Than One

The Wall Street Journal:

In the early 1960s, Michael S. Gazzaniga, then a graduate student at the California Institute of Technology, was one of a team of researchers who opened the minds of fellow scientists to a new view of how the brain functions. In “Tales From Both Sides of the Brain,” he tells the story of the seminal discoveries in which he was involved and chronicles the lifetime of exploration that has flowed from them.

Mr. Gazzaniga’s signature area of research is called “split brain” studies. They were pioneered by his Caltech mentor, Roger W. Sperry, who won a Nobel Prize in 1981. Surgically separating the two cerebral hemispheres by cutting the sheath of nerves that connects them—as was once done to treat intractable epilepsy or remove certain tumors—permitted researchers to observe “two mental systems,” as the author puts it, “each with its own sense of purpose and quite independent of the other.”

Read the whole story: The Wall Street Journal