A Talk by a Neuroscientist Michael Gazzaniga

Michael Gazzaniga, Neuroscientist came to Melbourne to give a public lecture on his work in Cognitive Neuroscience in Split Brain. The talk was really wonderful, where he has summarized all this life work for 40 years into 1 hour. The feeling is really wonderful, where 2000 people turned up for the talk.

Split brain, is occurs in patient where the corpus callosum was excised from the brain by operation to relief patients from epilepsy attack. The corpus callosum was the major tissue to connect the left and right hemisphere of the brain. So the initial idea of the operation procedure was to take out the corpus callosum and hence disconnect the left brain and the right brain. By doing so, when there is epilepsy attack on the patient, the episode of attack will only affecting one side of the brain and hence one side of the body only and the patient has another side of the body to control the attack.



However, the question after the operation was raised whether there is any significant function of the corpus callosum or just merely connecting two side of the brain. Micheal Gazzaniga used his lifetime to carefully observed these patients, and found some interesting discoveries. Left brain, which is known for its logic, verbal and analytical function and right brain is known for its image visualization function. So when was shown to a patient with a word 'spoon' with left eye (right eye was blinded), and the patient was asked what was the word. The patient cannot answer and say I dont know. But during the same instant, the patient was able to select the object in front of him and by using his left hand only, without any conscious image, the patient was able to pick up the spoon as a respond.