PSYC 311 Lecture Notes - Lecture 6: Calcarine Sulcus, Roger Wolcott Sperry, Orbitofrontal Cortex

• School: McGill University
• Department: Psychology
• Course: PSYC 311
• Professor: Michalakis Petrides

Document Summary

We have two cerebral hemispheres and they are joined together by the corpus callosum. This is referred to as the great commissural system because it is the largest fibre system of this kind. There is another system, the anterior commissure, which is smaller, and joins the temporal lobe in each hemisphere. Pharmacologically intractable epilepsy there isn"t much you can do to fix it. These patients had extremely, very frequent, epileptic seizures. in the 1930s, surgeons cut the corpus callosum and the anterior commissure in patients for whom medication was not strong enough. This procedure was called a commissurotomy or split brain . The idea was that severing the interhemispheric fissure would prevent the spread/severity of epileptic seizures from the left to the right hemisphere. When these patients were tested neuropsychologically, there didn"t seem to be any impairments. This caused us to question if the corpus callosum was even necessary.