Joseph E. Bogen

Joseph E. Bogen (1926–2005), American neurosurgeon. With the neurosurgeon Philip Vogel he performed the modern-era complete corpus callosotomies, beginning in 1962, that produced the patients Sperry and Gazzaniga studied. He was part of the Caltech research circle, a clinical professor of neurosurgery at USC and adjunct at UCLA, and wrote extensively on hemispheric duality.

Stake§

Clinical and intellectual. Bogen was the surgeon who made the cases, and also a participant in the consciousness debate they opened — he argued for a real duality of mind, so he had a stake in the operation he performed carrying deep significance rather than being a narrow epilepsy treatment.

Bogen's contribution to this topic is the operation that created its subjects. Cutting the corpus callosum to stop seizures spreading between hemispheres controlled otherwise intractable epilepsy, and the patients' surprising everyday normality is what made their disconnection worth studying. Beyond the surgery, Bogen wrote on what he took the two hemispheres to mean — his "other side of the brain" papers argued for two modes of mind — and he was among those who connected the split-brain findings to broader claims about divided consciousness.