the.com/lateralization
your brain moonlights as two specialists sharing one skull and a very slow intercom.
means the tendency for one hemisphere of the brain to handle a given mental function more than the other does.
from from latin lateralis, of the side; the idea crystallized in the 1860s when paul broca noticed that language loss followed damage to the left hemisphere specifically, not the brain in general.
broca's clueleft-hemisphere stroke patients lost speech, not comprehension
corpus callosum200 million fibers ferrying messages between the two sides
not absolutemost functions involve both hemispheres, just unevenly
handedness linkabout 95 percent of right-handers have left-side language
for instance
split-brain patients — 1960s epilepsy surgery severed the callosum, revealing two semi-independent minds
broca's area — left frontal lobe region, damage there strips speech production
wada test — anesthetizes one hemisphere to map language before brain surgery
bird song circuits — zebra finches also show left-dominant song control