The other side of the brain: The politics of split-brain research in the 1970s-1980s.
Michael E Staub
History of psychology November 2016 DOI: 10.1037/hop0000035 (opens in new tab)
Study at a glance
AI-extracted from the abstract| Characteristics | Historical analysis Peer reviewed |
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| Key points | Argues that 1970s and 1980s split-brain theories, which cast the right hemisphere as creative and the left as rational and linguistic, were widely applied to gender, education, management, race, and countercultural self-expression. The author contends these applications were contradictory: some experiments treated the brain as plastic and improvable through practices like mindfulness meditation, while others claimed Native Americans, African Americans, and people from "the East" inherently had more developed right-brain talents and suffered in a left-hemisphere-dominated Western society. |
Abstract
In the course of the 1970s and 1980s, theories derived from neuropsychological research on the bisected brain came rapidly to achieve the status of common sense in the United States and Canada, inflecting all manner of popular and academic discussion. These theories often posited that the right hemisphere was the seat of creative expression, whereas the left hemisphere housed rationality and language. This article analyzes the political and cultural implications of theories about the split brain. Gender relations, educational reform, management theory, race relations, and countercultural concepts about self-expression all quickly came to be viewed through the lens of left-brain/right-brain neuropsychological research. Yet these theories were often contradictory. On the one hand, some psychophysiological experiments premised that the brain was inherently plastic in nature, and thus self-improvement techniques (like mindfulness meditation) could be practiced to unfurl the right hemisphere's intuitive potentialities. On the other hand, other psychophysiological experiments concluded that Native Americans as well as African Americans and persons from "the East" appeared inherently to possess more highly developed right-brain talents, and therefore suffered in the context of a left-hemisphere-dominated Western society. In both instances, psychologists put neuroscientific research to political and social use. This article thus connects a story from the annals of the neurosciences to the history of psychological experimentation. It analyzes the critical impact that speculative ideas about the split brain were to have not only on the post-1960s history of psychology but also on what soon emerged after the 1990s as the social neuroscience revolution. (PsycINFO Database Record