History
The first instances of this theory began during the nineteenth century. According to the theory, every person has two perfectly formed brains, each of which can be substituted for the other in case of some traumatic, unilateral brain injury. In this time, it was thought that each side of the brain was associated with a specific gender: the left corresponding with masculinity and the right with femininity and each half could function independently. The right side of the brain was seen as the inferior and thought to be prominent in women, savages, children, criminals, and the insane. A prime example of this can be seen in Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
Scientists of the time disagreed on whether these cases of hemisphere imbalance could be cured, but some did believe that there was an analogy between muscular exertion and brain activity, meaning a person could physically strengthen one side of their brain.
These studies continued up until about the 1920s before they died out because psychiatrists turned to psychological explanations and neurologists emphasized holistic brain dynamics. The brain duality was revived though in the 1960s with Roger Sperry’s split-brain experiments. In one of Sperry’s studies, he showed a split-brain patient a picture to his right brain and the left hemisphere, responsible for verbal responses, could not articulate what was being seen. But the patient’s left hand, connected to the right brain, was able to give a thumbs-up or thumbs-down showing whether he approved of the picture or not.
Read more about this topic: Dual Brain Theory
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“I think that Richard Nixon will go down in history as a true folk hero, who struck a vital blow to the whole diseased concept of the revered image and gave the American virtue of irreverence and skepticism back to the people.”
—William Burroughs (b. 1914)
“Regarding History as the slaughter-bench at which the happiness of peoples, the wisdom of States, and the virtue of individuals have been victimized—the question involuntarily arises—to what principle, to what final aim these enormous sacrifices have been offered.”
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)
“What has history to do with me? Mine is the first and only world! I want to report how I find the world. What others have told me about the world is a very small and incidental part of my experience. I have to judge the world, to measure things.”
—Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951)