1913 1994
Roger W. Sperry
Cerebral lateralizationUnity of consciousness
in Split brain
Roger Wolcott Sperry (1913–1994), American neuropsychologist and neurobiologist. Hixon Professor of Psychobiology at the California Institute of Technology from 1954, he came to the brain from an earlier programme on nerve-fibre regeneration that produced the chemoaffinity hypothesis. He directed the split-brain research on Vogel and Bogen's commissurotomy patients, and received the 1981 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for it.
Stake§
Scientific, reputational, and philosophical. Sperry argued for consciousness as an emergent, causally real property of brain organisation, against the behaviourism of his era, and the divided-consciousness reading of the split brain was his strongest evidence for treating awareness as something a science could locate.
Sperry's contribution to this topic is the programme itself and its two-minds reading. By testing the disconnected hemispheres one at a time, his lab established hemispheric specialisation — language on the left, spatial and face processing on the right — and in his 1968 synthesis he read the results as two separate spheres of conscious awareness in one skull. That two-minds claim put split-brain work at the centre of the science of consciousness; it is also the specific leap that Pinto and colleagues later set out to reverse.