Advantages of Brain Lateralization
The widespread lateralization of many vertebrate animals indicates an evolutionary advantage associated with the specialization of each hemisphere. In one experiment, baby chicks were lateralized before hatching by exposing their eggs to light. These chicks were set to a task of picking out food from a bed of pebbles. Neither the lateralized, nor the non-lateralized chicks had a problem with this task, but the lateralized chicks only used the eye on the side of which they were lateralized to pick up the pebbles. When presented with a second task of watching for a cutout of a predatory hawk, the discrepancy between lateralized and non-lateralized chicks became evident. Lateralized chicks could pick food out of the pebbles with one eye and one half of the brain while using the other eye and other half of their brain to monitor the skies for predators. Not only could non-lateralized chicks not complete the two tasks simultaneously, but their performance of the single task deteriorated. This suggests that the evolutionary advantage of lateralization comes from the capacity to perform separate parallel tasks in each hemisphere of the brain.
Read more about this topic: Lateralization Of Brain Function
Famous quotes containing the words advantages of, advantages and/or brain:
“Can you conceive what it is to native-born American women citizens, accustomed to the advantages of our schools, our churches and the mingling of our social life, to ask over and over again for so simple a thing as that “we, the people,” should mean women as well as men; that our Constitution should mean exactly what it says?”
—Mary F. Eastman, U.S. suffragist. As quoted in History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 4 ch. 5, by Susan B. Anthony and Ida Husted Harper (1902)
“But there are advantages to being elected President. The day after I was elected, I had my high school grades classified Top Secret.”
—Ronald Reagan (b. 1911)
“I was taught that the human brain was the crowning glory of evolution so far, but I think it’s a very poor scheme for survival.”
—Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. (b. 1922)