On Sun, 09 Jan 2011 11:44:40 -0800, michael sylvester wrote: >The original intent of the split brain procedure was to confine epileptic >seizures to one side of the brain.
According to the standard histories, mostly true. The first person to engage in cutting the corpus callosum was a neurosurgeon William Van Wagenen and he reported the results of his surgery in 1940 in the Archives of Neurology and Psychiatry; see: http://archneurpsyc.ama-assn.org/cgi/content/summary/44/4/740 Unfortunately, the operation on humans was unsuccessful. If you search for "Van Wagenen" on scholar.google.com, you'll find several articles by him on the procedure. Overall, it did not seem like a promising procedure. Roger Sperry was working at roughly the same time but with animals. A list of Sperry's articles is available here: http://people.uncw.edu/puente/sperry/sperrypapers/ Sperry provides a review of the his work on the corpus callosum in a Scientific American article "The Great Cerebral Commisure" which was published in 1964 (See #105 at the above website). In it Sperry tells that his interest in this area began around 1950 and the first research article on the effect of cutting the corpus callosum on animal learning was Myers and Sperry 1953 (it was Myers' dissertation; the "publication" is #48 at the above website). Mike Gazzaniga started to work with Sperry around this time and was interested in trying to replicate Wagenen's work. With the aid of neurosurgeon Joseph Bogen, Gazzaniga and Sperry were able to perform the first "new" split-brain operation in 1961. One source for this information is Anthony Stringer's "Pathways to Prominence in Neuropsychology" which is available on books.google.com; the information regarding Mike G comes from page 73 which should be accessible from this link: http://books.google.com/books?id=-ahIs81yyTkC&pg=PA73&dq=sperry++%22William+Van+Wagenen%22+brain&hl=en&ei=gCcqTeXcJJSssAPLsM3aBw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CCcQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=sperry%20%20%22William%20Van%20Wagenen%22%20brain&f=false or http://tinyurl.com/splitbrain001 -Mike Palij New York University [email protected] --- You are currently subscribed to tips as: [email protected]. To unsubscribe click here: http://fsulist.frostburg.edu/u?id=13090.68da6e6e5325aa33287ff385b70df5d5&n=T&l=tips&o=7793 or send a blank email to leave-7793-13090.68da6e6e5325aa33287ff385b70df...@fsulist.frostburg.edu
