Lateralized Brains
I had the opportunity to hold a brain during my trip to the morgue a few years ago. It was an amazing experience. The brain is soft and infirm. It looks relatively symmetrical with each half held together at the corpus callosum.
But each half is not perfectly symmetrical and that goes against the pop psychological “left-right brain” theories. Actually each half is not a mirror image of the other which enables us to perform .jpg)
different tasks at the same time.
“In the 1990s psychologist Michael Corballis of the University of Auckland in New Zealand argued that the asymmetry of the brain – known as lateralization - was a key step in the evolution of our species, giving us language and additional mental powers that other animals lack.
“Today Corballis readily admits he was wrong. Lateralized brains are not unique to humans. Parrots prefer picking up things with their left foot. Toads tend to attack other toads from the right but go after prey from the left. Zebra fish are likely to look at new things with their right eye and familiar th.jpg)
ings with their left….”
The May 2009 edition of Discover Magazine published an article by Carl Zimmer who frequently publishes on brain issues. He says, “One hypothesis is that a lateralized brain is more powerful than one that works like a mirror image. Instead of two matching parts of the brain performing an identical task, one can take charge, leaving the other free to do something else.”
It seems that our ability to multitask is owed largely to our not so symmetrical brain halves. Zimmer’s article is fascinating and can be read by clicking here.
