Contemporary Neuroscience Humanizes: A Look at Cortical Bilateral Asymmetry and How It Got That Way

Abstract

Exciting research that has surfaced from a host of neuroscience laboratories is presented, and the assumption that they have little to offer human science considered. This includes the sensory substitution work of Bach-y-Rita (1967), as well as the phantom pain hypothesis of Ramachandran (2011). These studies are considered atop the theoretical and meta-analytical work in the field of neuropsychiatry by McGilchrist (2009). McGilchrist's inquiry into split-brain patients has resuscitated the once-dubious debate regarding hemispheric differences in the brain. By considering the latter in light of the evidence of neuroplasticity, global differences in right- or left-brain preference may be understood as analogous and reciprocally influential to patterns of thinking. This dynamic relationship between experience and the brain requires a reconsideration of the status of neuroscience as an exclusively reductive enterprise. Indeed, the laboratories seem to be producing results that have become increasingly difficult to reconcile with their biologically reductive commitments. While the neuroscientists are busy sorting out their results, those who do not share said commitments are free to enjoy the implications these results suggest.

Notes

¹The role of agency may be considered in greater depth through Goldberg's (2009) conversation wherein passive, detached attention is discerned from active, personal attention; the differences may be identified with frontal-cortex activation.

²“Function is reflected in volume throughout the central nervous system, in cerebrum, cerebellum, and spinal cord. A nice example, which not only illustrates the point but suggests that brain areas in individuals may actually grow in response to use, is the fact that the right posterior hippocampus, the area of the brain which stores complex three-dimensional maps in space, is large in London cabbies, taxi drivers with extensive navigational experience. Another vivid demonstration of the principle comes from the left hemisphere of songbirds, which expands during the mating season, and then shrinks again once the mating season is over” (McGilchrist, 2009, p. 24).

³Parsons and Osherson (2001) found, using PET scanners, that the solutions to deductive problems, which were associated with activation in the right amygdala were associated with the cathartic Aha! experience. This was not found for probabilistic problem-solving, which provided no activation of right or left amygdala. They write: “We speculate that an emotional basis for such activation is provided by the ‘Aha!’ phenomenology reported for the deductive task in post-experimental interviews” (p. 960).

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Notes on contributors

Patrick M. Whitehead

Patrick M. Whitehead is concluding his third year as a PhD student in the humanistic psychology department at the University of West Georgia, where he also completed his MA (2011, “Adventures in Isomorphism: Gestalt Theory and the Philosophy of Human Science”). Working closely with Christopher M. Aanstoos, PhD, Patrick has been studying the implications of phenomenology for inquiry methodology in psychology, with an emphasis on the latter's historical development. Most recently, this has been directed toward the development of a phenomenologically informed psychophysics.