Describe the effect of having a split brain. What would happen if information were given only to the right or the left hemisphere?

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

ANSWER:
Working with split-brain people, researchers have a chance to study the functioning of each hemisphere independent of the other. For example, split-brain research helped researchers conclude that the left hemisphere enables us to produce speech. Researcher Michael Gazzaniga (1967) briefly flashed pictures of familiar objects to the right and left visual fields of split-brain people and asked them to identify the objects. When an object is briefly presented to the right peripheral field of vision, the resulting visual information is sent directly to the left hemisphere of the brain. Because Broca’s area is in the left hemisphere for most people, Gazzaniga found that the average split-brain person could verbally identify the object.
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But what about an object presented to the person’s left peripheral field of vision? When an object is briefly shown on the far left side, the resulting visual information is sent directly to the right hemisphere of the brain. Recall that most people do not have a Broca’s area in their right hemisphere. In a normal brain, the information travels from the right hemisphere across the corpus callosum to the language centers in the left hemisphere. However, in split-brain individuals, this cannot happen. Without the corpus callosum, Gazzaniga’s split-brain could not transmit the knowledge of what they were seeing to the language centers in their left hemisphere. The right brain knew what the objects were, but it could not inform the “speaking” left brain! Predictably, the split-brain people were unable to name the objects they saw in their left visual fields. Interestingly, in this situation, split- brain people were able to point to the objects in a drawing—provided they used their left hand (which is controlled by the right brain). Split-brain research has helped us begin to sort out the relative contributions that the right and left hemispheres make to everyday cognitive processes.