What’s the right hemisphere doing? [Guest Post by William Matchin]

Guest post by William Matchin:What's the right hemisphere doing?This is a question that has been bothering me for about two years, emerging from the results of an fMRI experiment that I performed in the twilight of graduate school, and recently butting into my consciousness again after Greg and I finally published the paper. The paper is called “‘Syntactic perturbation’ activates the right IFG, but not Broca’s area or the ATL”, recently published in Frontiers in Psychology as part of a special topic on “Components of the Language-Ready Brain” edited by Cedric Boeckx and Antonio Benítez-Burraco. The title is a bit of a mouthful, I know. What we showed is that when you’re producing a sentence, if you’re forced to change the structure of the sentence-mid utterance, the right IFG (among other areas) lights up like a Christmas tree.I think it’s a good paper, but what’s important about it are not the specific results, but rather the larger question that the results point toward. Hemispheric asymmetries were all the rage in the 60s and 70s, but have died out in the last couple of decades. However, just as Mad Men brought back 60s fashion and interior decor, I’d like to bring back the hemisphere question.So let me ask again. What’s the right hemisphere doing?Any ideas?I think there are some reasons to suggest that this question is actually important (you know, for science) rather than for the purposes of explaining that line in the table of significant acti...
Source: Talking Brains - Category: Neuroscience Authors: Source Type: blogs