Roger Sperry, the maverick brain scientist who was haunted by psyche.
Frontiers in Human Neuroscience January 1, 2024 Giovanni Berlucchi, Carlo Alberto Marzi
Roger Sperry was a maverick neuroscientist who arrived at definitive ideas about brain function by departing from the views of his peers. He solved the riddle of the corpus callosum and won a Nobel prize for identifying the different cognitive abilities of the disconnected right and left hemispheres. He could have won another Nobel for his work on prenatal formation of behavioral neuronal networks. Later in life, he fought an inconclusive battle to demonstrate that mental and spiritual factors can direct brain activity without violating orthodox neurophysiology. The paper discusses nodal points in his career and sources of inspiration within twentieth-century neuroscience.