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They're not "brain patients" who happen to be "split"; they're patients whose brains are split. Hence this hyphen. |
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In the [[1940s]], [[Canada | Canadian]] [[neurosurgery | neurosurgeon]] [[Wilder Penfield]] and his [[neurologist]] colleague [[Herbert Jasper]] developed a technique of brain mapping to help reduce [[Adverse effect (medicine) | side effect]]s caused by [[surgery]] to treat [[epilepsy]]. They stimulated [[motor cortex | motor]] and [[somatosensory cortex | somatosensory cortices]] of the brain with small electrical currents to activate discrete brain regions. They found that stimulation of one hemisphere's motor cortex could produce [[muscle]] contraction on the opposite side of the body. Furthermore, the functional map of the motor and [[Somatosensory system|sensory]] cortices is fairly consistent from person to person; Penfield and Jasper's famous pictures of the motor and sensory [[homunculus|homunculi]] were the result.
===Split
Research by [[Michael Gazzaniga]] and [[Roger Wolcott Sperry]] in the [[1960s]] on [[split-brain]] patients led to an even greater understanding of functional laterality. Split-brain patients are patients who have undergone corpus callosotomy (usually as a treatment for severe epilepsy), a severing of the [[corpus callosum]]. The corpus callosum connects the two hemispheres of the brain and allows them to communicate. When these connections are cut, the two halves of the brain act independently of one another. This led to many interesting [[behavior]]al phenomena that allowed Gazzaniga and Sperry to study the contributions of each hemisphere to various cognitive and perceptual processes. One of their main findings was that the right hemisphere was capable of rudimentary lanugage processing, but often has no lexical or grammatical abilities{{an|Kandel}}.
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