Roger Sperry Studies the Split Brain

In 1981, Roger W. Sperry shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his discovery of the "split brain." Sperry's research, conducted in the Norman W. Church Laboratory for Chemical Biology, included studying patients whose corpus callosum—the structure connecting and serving as the principal channel for communication between the two hemispheres of the brain—had been severed in order to treat severe epileptic seizures. The two hemispheres, he discovered, have different functions, with the left half controlling verbal and mathematical functions as well as analytic and sequential reasoning, and the right half concentrating on spatial and conceptual reasoning, visualization, and creativity. Sperry's work further showed that the functions of the right hemisphere are as important as those of the left, which had previously been thought to be dominant.