Do We All Have Split Brains?

When you're doing two things at once - like listening to the radio while driving - your brain organizes itself into two, functionally independent networks, almost as if you temporarily have two brains. That's according to a fascinating new study from University of Wisconsin-Madison neuroscientists Shuntaro Sasai and colleagues. It's called Functional split brain in a driving/listening paradigm In referring to 'split brains' in their title, Sasai et al. are linking their work to the literature on patients who have had a callosotomy, a radical brain operation that literally splits the brain in two by cutting the corpus callosum, the nerve tract that connects the left and right hemispheres of the cerebral cortex. Only a small number of people with severe epilepsy have a callosotomy, but Sasai et al. argue that the healthy brain can 'split' itself when multitasking. Here's how Sasai et al. illustrate the hypothesis of a 'functional' ...