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Example research essay topic: Side Of The Brain Corpus Callosum - 1,036 words

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... e right ear, most visual-spatial functions are not exclusive to the right brain. A common one impaired by strokes is the ability to put things back together again -- to reassemble the parts of a disassembled flashlight or toaster. Right-side damage causes such "construction apraxias" only about twice as often as comparable left-brain damage.

The chances are about the same that map-reading will be impaired. Dressing apraxias, a conceptual inability to match up sleeves with arms when getting dressed, is five times more common on the right. Odds like 2 to 1, or even 5 to 1, are a far cry from language's strong 13 to 1 lateralization ratio. Thus it isn't left or right but both left and right in varying ratios for different functions. How do we find out? Our most detailed maps come not from stroke victims but from epileptics who are awake and talking while a neurosurgeon studies their brain, prior to removing the region which is starting the seizures.

But we never get the chance to study both sides of the brain at the same time in the same patient (no, contrary to the imagination of magazine illustrators, neurosurgeons do not just lift off the top of the head like a skullcap; they " re very selective and make an opening overlying the problem area -- on one side). Until the blood-flow and metabolic nonsurgical techniques become more sophisticated, we will continue to have difficulty determining the maps of an individual's left and right hemispheres, estimating the extent to which one side of the brain can outperform (i. e. , "dominate") the other in generating a particular human ability. But, the neurophysiologies objects, functionally everything may be all mixed up in a working brain. How can you know what the right brain is capable of by itself, on its own? Simple.

As every reader of pop psychology now knows, just cut the corpus callosum which connects the left and right cerebral cortex. Et voila, the split brain, isolating the two minds and all that. These studies, which won a Nobel Prize in 1981 for Roger Sperry, have caught the eye of a public that is fascinated by Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde split-personality stories. Not that any of the split-brain patients have anything dramatic along that line, it's just that their right hand doesn't always approve of what their left hand is doing.

Interpreting the result is far harder than doing the surgery, as the original investigators have noted. Take, for example, the suggestion that the right brain has its own simple language center (some split-brain patients can spell out simple words with their left hand, controlled by the right brain). Many neuroscientist's familiar with the childhood plasticity of the brain have worried that the split-brain patients might be highly atypical of humans in general, that some of their left-brain functions might have moved over into their right brain during childhood. That happens to young children after a severe injury to the left brain (though, as millions of aphasic adults testify, it is an ability lost with age, probably mostly confined to the preschool years), and perhaps it happens in a child with severe epilepsy. Indeed, nearly all of the split-brain patients had their epilepsy from an early age. Unlike the epileptic operated upon in the more traditional brain-mapping cases, the split-brain candidate usually has seizures originating from a whole cerebral hemisphere rather than one small piece of it.

One way to try to avoid taking out the whole bad hemisphere is to just cut its connections to the good hemisphere, which was the surgical rationale for the splitting of the corpus callosum. Thus split-brain patients may be excellent candidates for studying the ability of functions to migrate from one hemisphere to the other during early childhood, rather than excellent candidates for inferring the separate abilities of the two hemispheres. Details! Just give me the big picture -- isn't that language on the left, visual-spatial imagery on the right? And isn't language all tied up with sequential things, narrowly focused cause-and-effect reasoning?

And isn't the right brain better at holistic, seeing-the-big-picture sorts of things? Why not talk about two minds? Maybe. But we must be careful to distinguish the interesting questions from the factual answers. In science, one tries to phrase questions narrowly and carefully, then gather the data so as to force nature to yield up unequivocal answers.

We are just getting started at asking productive questions. We are just acquiring some of the needed tools, though they are still quite inadequate to satisfy our appetites for knowledge. And while neuropsychology and neurophysiology struggle along trying to get firmer answers on shrinking research budgets, the left-righter's are happily charging ahead full steam, prematurely assigning functions to left and right brain with all the enthusiasm of nineteenth-century phrenologists. Nowadays, one cannot even publish a drawing techniques book without invoking the liberation of the repressed right brain. I'm told that it's even a good drawing book, but its best-seller status is probably due to its gimmick of borrowing a quasi-scientific foundation.

And it was a most successful gimmick at that -- the taxes paid on the take from Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain and its many imitators probably exceed the world's neuropsychology research budgets. Now perhaps that's the way to finance our research in the starvation-budgets era! We researchers can get together and write (unscientifically and anonymously, of course) a really splendid right-brain best-seller. Perhaps a marriage manual, showing how a right-brain type can achieve compatibility with a left-brain type? Or maybe a cat book for right-brain people? No, I've got it -- Cooking on the Right Side of the Brain!

We " ll locate cooking skills on the right-brain map just above the right nostril. And we won't let the cook add together the ingredients in the usual sequential way -- which is, of course, a left-brain way of mixing. An obvious no-no. After all, the ingredients care with whom they mingle, who's in the bowl already when they arrive.

Instead, we " ll have the cook dump all of the ingredients into the mixing bowl simultaneously, in a great splashy, holistic, right brain moment of truth!


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Research essay sample on Side Of The Brain Corpus Callosum

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