Talk:Lateralization of brain function/Archive 1: Difference between revisions

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:::I think there are two seperate issues here. One is the category tag, which I should stay removed (good spot Comaze), since it seems to apply to the whole article, while it is only this one section that is ''potentially'' pseudoscientific. As I noted above, there is some scientific truth to the idea that the hemispheres do slightly different things, but that has been '''radically''' oversimplified, to the point of potential misrepresentation in the eyes of the generral public. I think Matlee is right to emphasize the word '''dominant''', which is exactly what is missing from much of the pop-culture discussions of lateralization of brain function. As for the actual content, I think that we should probably use more up-to-date and more cognitive neuroscience references, of which I can suggest three good ones here off the top of my head:

:::*J. Graham Beaumont (1983). ''Introduction to Neuropsychology.'' The Guilford Press. {{ISBN |0898625157}}. - This book is a bit dated (he is working on an updated version) but his discussion of the link between lesions of the left or right hemisphere, language and handedness is some of the most detailed and complete in the textbook world.

:::* Michael S. Gazzaniga, Richard B. Ivry, George R. Mangun (2002). ''Cognitive Neuroscience, Second Edition.'' W. W. Norton & Company {{ISBN |0393977773}}. - This is the textbook that we used when I was an undergraduate, and will be one of the two texts that I will use (along with Ramachandran's ''Phantoms in the Brain'') when I teach my own class. It includes a seperate chapter on lateralization of brain function (Ch. 9), but also treats lateralization in the appropriate places, along with the relevant topics. They are currently working on a third edition. Note, also that Ivry and Robertson have a more integrated account of how such differences might arise from low-level differences in the spatial and temporal frequencies preferentially treated by the two hemispheres (''The Two Sides of Perception'', 1997 MIT Press) although this is probably beyond the scope of the current article. Also, of course, there is a thorough treatment of split-brain work here, given that Gazzaniga is first author.

:::*Jamie Ward (2006). ''The Student's Guide to Cognitive Neuroscience.'' Psychology Press. 1841695343. The most recent cognitive neuroscience textbook on the market, and one that is unique in that, it is the only one (so far) to have chapters on topics like the cognitive neuroscience of reading and numerical cognition (Chs. 11 and 12, respectively). It also tends to place more emphasis on neuropsychological methods than does the Gazzaniga text (which is why I would supplement Gazzaniga with Ramachandran). Again, there's no separate chapter on lateralizaition of function, but the lateralizations of these functions are treated within the appropriate contexts.

::: The important thing to me is that we, in some way, point out this more subtle point. One hemisphere or the other can be dominant for a given function, this varies by handedness, by sex, etc, but at the same time, there is a lot of this type of stuff that has been radically oversimplified in the public literature, since the earliest discoveries of some of these divisions of labor in the human brain. [[User:Edhubbard|Edhubbard]] 07:28, 27 June 2007 (UTC)