People
Medicine, Mind, and the Double Brain
By Anne Harrington
The human brain consists of two half-spheres, or hemispheres, joined at the median line by great tracts of fibers. Since the 1860s, it has been known that the two hemispheres do not have identical functions: the left half seems to be the "talking" half of the brain, the right seems to be...well, that became the question. This book explores the way in which, across the 19th and early 20th-century, brain duality and brain left-right asymmetry excited debate, experimentation and speculation in fields as diverse as criminology (were criminals dominated by the more primitive right hemisphere?), hysteria and hypnosis research (was it possible to hypnotize the two brain hemispheres separately?), psychiatry (could brain duality account for cases of divided or double consciousness?), anthropology, education, clinical neurology, and more. By the 1920s, much of this impassioned literature had sunk into obscurity. Then, in the late 1960s, the double brain was rediscovered in the wake of new high-profile "split-brain" operations that again excited wide-spread cross-disciplinary debate, research, and speculation. Medicine, Mind and the Double Brain connects the dots between the newer work and its 19th-century analogues, and asks questions about the larger meaning of our continuing preoccupation with our anatomical duality and asymmetry.
Contact
- Email: aharring@fas.harvard.edu
- Phone: (617) 496-5234
Classes
- HS 171: Narrative and Neurology
- HS 175: Madness and Medicine
- HS 176: Evolution and Human Nature
- HS 177: Stories Under the Skin
- HS 273: Freud and the American Academy
- HS 275: The Minded Body
- HS 278: In Search of Mind
Works
- Medicine, Mind, and the Double Brain
- The Placebo Effect
- Reenchanted Science
- The Dalai Lama at MIT
- The Cure Within
