Perception of Bilateral Chimeric Figures Following Oculary Obstruction Joel Cann
Literature Review:
Our brains consist of billions of neurons, which make up the various cortices, which are fundamental in the workings of the four lobes. These four combine and make two hemispheres that are connected and yet very different in the way they process and output information. The right hemisphere is responsible for the more creative side of our personality, things like music, visual art, humour, spontaneity and other similar traits. While the left hemisphere focuses on the logical side, such as chronology, language, mathematical processing, “common sense,” along with other factual knowledge. With these distinctly different hemispheres working together we usually get balanced results in how we handle situations, but, does one hemisphere over-power another? What would happen if they processed the same information while separated?
The answer to the latter was researched by a number of scientists and psychologists. The base research was done by Michael Gazzaniga and Roger Wolcott Sperry. They researched specifically on people who had undergone surgery to separate their brain hemispheres (corpus callosotomy), which was used as a treatment for epileptic seizures. Because of this separation Sperry was able to determine which hemisphere was used for mathematics and language as well as the hemisphere for drawing and music. Gazzaniga focused his study on the functions of the hemispheres and what parts of the body that each controlled, finding that the left hemisphere controlled the right half of the body and vice-versa, he also studied with people who had undergone corpus callosotomy. Three researchers, Jerre Levy, Colwyn Trevarthen, and previously mentioned Roger Sperry, worked together to develop a new experiment, based on some of Gazzaniga’s work. The hypothesis of this experiment was, as stated in Brain (1972), “...that the two disconnected hemispheres, working on the...