MUSICAL BRAIN

The following article is adapted and updated from a feature story syndicated in 1971 by Universal Science News, William B. Cromie, editor.

SING A SONG OF SIXPENCE and whether your pockets fill with rye or corn, one side of your brain dishes up the lyrics while the other is supposed to pipe in the music. That's been the conventional wisdom for a quarter century, ever since two Los Angeles scientists, Joseph Bogen and Harold Gordon reported what people did with only one side of the brain working. But, as newer findings suggest, the story may be more complicated.

SPLIT BRAINS

What began in the 1950's with Roger Sperry's Nobel Prize-winning Split Brain research is almost part of everyday knowledge, certainly on the talk shows. Recently, a group at Yale made observation that brings sex into the picture.

NUMB BRAIN

Bogen and Gordon made their classic discoveries in people with one cerebral hemisphere temporarily numbed while the other remained awake. They did find evidence of some information seepage between the two sides. Just how much, varied from person to person, from a little to a lot.

BRAIN MINERS

When they started out, all they were trying to do was perfect a simple pre-surgical screening test. In the process, though, The "Brain Miners," as they're sometimes affectionately called, went on to bring up from the mysterious tunnels of the human brain a crude ore, loaded with knowledge about the treasure chests of talent, personality and even self.

NEEDLE IN THE NECK

Bogen and Gordon studied hospital patients who'd had the anesthetic, sodium amytal injected into the big carotid artery on the right side of the neck. The anesthetic raced up into the skull and soaked mainly the right cerebral hemisphere. Although some did flow over into the left side through a circle of connecting arteries it remained there only briefly.

How could they tell?

OPPOSITES CONTROL

Brain hemispheres control opposite sides of the body. Bogen and Gordon, thus, could gauge amytal by its effects on a patient's ability to do such things as the wiggle toes, wave "hello!" or thumb wrestle. As long as a patient couldn't work the opposite side of his or her body, Bogen and Gordon knew the hemisphere was under the influence of amytal.

With the left brain on and the right off, Bogen and Gordon had the patients sing; most had little trouble with lyrics from, say, "London Bridges" or "Mary Had A Little Lamb". And they could tap the beat fairly well.

BELLOWING CALF

Melody? With a numb left brain, a patient's attempts to sing came off like the atonal bellow of an abandoned calf.

Nature's general rules seemed to be: words, left, music right. But within the broad- brush guidelines, each person functioned as an individual human being.

Bogen and Gordon had the patients rehearse beforehand. They sang with the lyrics and also learned to hum the melody by itself. While this was going on, they practiced coordination tests that later would serve as the gauge for whether the hemisphere was off or on. Then, just before the amytal, even with the needle sticking in their neck and waiting for the plunger to send the anesthetic pulsing into the brain, Bogen and Gordon made tape recordings of the patient's words and music.

From double and triple matching of words-music-coordination -- both before and after -- the two scientists mapped and explored.

How quickly it took to regain different recollections showed a patient's information seepage and the extent he or she used his or her right cerebral hemisphere for vocabulary. "Bilaterality," [ugh!] -- meaning that both sides of the brain had the talent -- Bogen and Gordon called this apparent parceling out

TALENTS

A few patients showed relatively large amounts of bilaterality. To prove it out, Bogen and Gordon studied effects of amytal injected into the left side, One pleasant little woman supplied Bogen and Gordon with dramatic proof that words could live in the musical right hemisphere. After the amytal went into her left carotid artery, she didn't utter a sound for a full seven full minutes. Not a word or a note. Then, all of a sudden she began to sing and speak simultaneously, as judged from her still- sleeping right hand, even though her left hemisphere was still frozen.

There was little doubt about which hemisphere was musical one and which seemed to have access to the verbal past. But it was never cut and dry. The human brain wasn't, after all, just a factory machine. Instead each person was like a symphony, varying magnificently off a central human theme.

DOMINEERING GROUCH

Earlier research of Sperry's told Brain Miners that most people read, write and do arithmetic with the left cerebral hemisphere. This even appears to hold for left- handed persons. It's a domineering side, the left hemisphere. Grouchy, no non-sense, it governs everyday affairs with the rubber- stamp efficiency of a bureaucrat. And it seems to push the right side around.

But the sensitive side of a person, the one with the ideas, thoughts, recollections, notions of form, texture and visual perspective -- the mental material of the creative arts -- that belongs to the meek and gentle right hemisphere of the brain, which Nature also seems to bless with music. Do the words that seep over to the right side also make for poetry?

EINSTEIN, PICASSO AND THE BEATLES

Exactly how bilateral seepage might work remains to be discovered. But the complex mixture could be what creates the unique sets of talents each of us knows as our individual selves.

What mixtures make a Picasso? An Einstein? An Isaac Stern? A Beatle? A Carl Sandberg -- or a Hitler? Are there such things as unhealthy mixes? Might the mapping of bilaterality catch a Charles Manson in the making before the mixture translates into terrible human tragedy? Could the Brain Miner's techniques yield new forms of therapy? What about education after brain damage or a childhood of neglect, abuse and malnutrition? Education in general?

How, though, could a mix of memories and thoughts and access circuits into and out of storage really make any difference, especially with both sides of the brain connected up and turned on? First, our two sides may not always be awake together. There's evidence of that from brain wave analysis from sleep research. Then, too, there's also evidence that right and left brains can affect behavior quite differently. In some of Sperry's investigation with monkeys, one side could be stroking and fondling a little rag doll while the other might be thrashing the tar out of it. Sperry's group also found evidence that people act similarly.

LEONARDO DA VINCI, LEFTIES, DYSLEXIA

We're not acutely conscious of differences within our own head, possibly because of the brain's capacity to suppress or even repress much of what it actually stores. Consider right and left handed people. Many lefties find it easier to write backwards. Leonardo Da Vinci did. (What kind of a mixture must he have had?) That a left handed person can write at all may be a kind of minor miracle, in itself. Their brains must turn things around. And many a lefty, thrown into a right- handed world with an unsympathetic school teacher, has grown up to show the reading/writing problems known as dyslexia. But that the brain can make adjustments and compensations probably accounts for typical southpaw deadliness on the pitcher's mound.

The two cerebral hemispheres aren't duplicates. They exhibit what anatomists call bilateral symmetry, meaning they're like mirror images. But even anatomically, the two cerebral hemispheres of the human brain show distinct differences, especially in areas known to mediate language.

CAKE BATTER MEMORY

Brain Miners' observations notwithstanding, scientists have never succeeded in pinning down memory to one pigeon hole the brain. Many, in fact, don't believe memory is tucked away like that at all. Stanford University's Karl Pribram, who uses the hologram as a model of memory, thinks our memories distribute throughout wide areas, like heat on a skillet or, perhaps, marble- cake batter, the ingredients repeating over and over around the contours of the pan.

Maybe some spatial arrangement exists in how memory layers into the brain. Whether the storage is in the right or left hemisphere could be essential to a particular behavior: -- like trying to thread a needle; it's a lot harder if you have to do it with mirror.

The same could be true of any critical or complex decision. Suppose you wanted to rummage up a whole string of memories, say words, tunes, a few shapes, and paste them together with new information in order to build an idea or concept? Where or how far you had to reach for the pieces -- and whether you took along a scoop of the grumps or joy -- could determine what you ended up thinking about or imagining. And the twist your own special bilateral mixture puts on the dough before it hardened -- well, that could easily be why nobody else quite has your personal style (or flavor if you're a piece of cake).

The part of the brain that does all this wonderful collecting remains as much a mystery to the Brain Miners as anyone else. It may never be learned. Of course, the critics say that about virtually everything, anyway.

STROKE

It was not a total surprise that the left cerebral hemisphere came into play for language. Physicians have thought for centuries that the speech areas reside there. Stroke on the right side of the body often goes hand in hand with a kind of aphasia, or speech loss, in which the person knows what he or she wants to say but just can't express it. In 1870, a Frenchman named Pierre Paul Broca, using clinical and autopsy data, mapped out what he thought was the motor speech area. But it wasn't until 100 years later when two University of Rochester scientists, Dale McAdams and Harry Whitacker, proved (with electrophysiological methods) that Broca's area does indeed become active during speech.

Broca's area, on the left hemisphere, is about the size of a slightly milked quarter, deep in from where Viking warriors, and certain kinds of devils sprout a horn. The area is served by a dangerously delicate arterial twig -- its only source of nourishment and oxygen -- nicknamed "the artery of stroke."

Brain Miners discovered a few years ago that one hemisphere may be able to prevent the other from storing certain facts. They learned this on people who'd undergone the split-brain operation. Used only to relieve violent, drug- resistant epileptic seizures, split- brain turned out to be merciful release from a terrible grip. (Some patients went from one seizure into another and would have to be put under general anesthesia to be quieted.) The surgeon cuts the main connection (corpus callosum) between right and left hemispheres, leaving not only two nearly separated half- brains inside the head, but two permanently divorced personalities, as well. They were healthy personalities, and, aside from the divorce, you could say they were essentially normal.[1]

But there was a catch. While still joined (before the corpus callosum had been cut), the domineering grouch on the left had not permitted the meek and mild right cerebral hemisphere to keep what words it had come by. Not many, at least. Bullied all its life, the right hemisphere often awoke illiterate from a split- brain surgery. However, once liberated, the right side turned out to be as brilliant as it had been beautiful. It learned the three R's in six months flat.

If the right hemisphere could do all that so quickly, it should have little trouble picking up a stray word or name, here and there, during the time the left brain stays frozen with amytal. Amytal, then, could do temporarily what split- brain does irreversibly: give the recessive side of the brain a crack at the verbal world. Indeed the behavior of Bogen and Gordon's patients suggest this in fact happened.

What happens when the grouch awakens? Will it demand whatever the right side learned in his temporary absence? There's always an outside chance of that. But that probably won't happen. Laboratory experiments show that once a brain puts memory into long- term storage, it hangs onto it tightly, even though the information may be hidden from the consciousness Freud believed.

SEX TALK

In our own day, Brain Miners don't have to resort to the needle or the knife. Non- invasive methods such as MRI and Pet scanning furnish a window on the living brain.

Such high tech peeks have already suggested that not only are our two hemispheres different, but precisely how may depend on sex.[2] A group of investigators led by Bennett and Sally Shaywitz reported that during rhyme- judging tasks the left inferior frontal gyrus (around Broca's area) became active in men . In women, by contrast, the activated areas for the same tasks were spread around the frontal lobes of both right and left hemispheres. "Our data," they reported in Nature, (the world's leading science journal), "provide clear evidence for a sex difference in the functional organization of the brain for language..."

To a few pundits of pop culture "La différence"[3]as one writer calls hemispheric differences, suggests that men and women are basically different people. Maybe. But, pointing to the unpredictability of the damaged human brain, some scientist urge caution against jumping to hasty conclusions. Hemispheric differences remain a source of gems about the human brain. But too quick a conclusion could blind us from the real treasures the new Brain Miners' tools promise to bring forth. "Just relax and enjoy what's coming along," one old timer advised some of his students. Indeed, in the fascinating and on- going saga, there is much to appreciate in and for itself.

A right cerebral hemisphere:

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