Split Brains: What Happens When You Sever the Corpus Callosum?

In this video I cover research by Roger Sperry and Michael Gazzaniga on split brain patients who have had the corpus callosum severed. I explain some hemispheric specializations such as speech production and facial recognition as well as how visual information is separated into each hemisphere at the optic chiasm according to visual field.   Don’t forget to subscribe to … Read More

Parts of the Brain: Forebrain – Subcortical Structures

In this video I continue covering parts of the brain and move to the subcortical structures of the forebrain including the thalamus, pituitary gland, limbic system (hypothalamus, hippocampus, and amygdala), basal ganglia, and corpus callosum. I also mention the Genes to Cognition site (link below) which has an excellent interactive 3D brain feature which can help you to learn brain … Read More

Split Brains and Hemisphere Specialization

  One way of seeing differences between the two hemispheres comes from cases of patients with “split-brains”. These patients have had their corpus callosum severed in order to prevent the spread of epileptic seizures. While this process effectively stops the seizures, it also creates a few interesting side effects of having two hemispheres which are no longer able to communicate … Read More

Split-Brain Demonstrations

Here’s a clip from Scientific American Frontiers featuring Michael Gazzaniga discussing and demonstrating experiments with split-brain patient Joe.