Neurociencia Cognitiva Gazzaniga.pdf Apr 2026

In the 1960s, Gazzaniga and his colleagues conducted a series of experiments on patients with severe epilepsy who had undergone corpus callosotomy, a surgical procedure that severed the corpus callosum, the bundle of nerve fibers that connects the two hemispheres of the brain. These patients were often referred to as "split-brain" patients.

Gazzaniga's research on split-brain patients revealed some remarkable insights into the neural basis of cognition. For example, he found that when a word was presented to one hemisphere of the brain, the patient could identify the word, but when the word was presented to the other hemisphere, the patient could not. This suggested that the two hemispheres of the brain have different specialized functions, with the left hemisphere being more involved in language processing and the right hemisphere being more involved in spatial processing. Neurociencia Cognitiva Gazzaniga.pdf

This modular organization of the brain is often referred to as the "functional segregation" of brain areas. According to this view, different brain areas are specialized for different cognitive functions, and damage to one brain area can lead to specific cognitive deficits. In the 1960s, Gazzaniga and his colleagues conducted