Free Republic

 Diana Deutsch is a perceptual researcher who made discoveries about left-handedness and pitch perception. Her more important discovery is that people who grow up speaking tonal languages like Mandarin have a greater advantage in the pitch component of musicality. About left-handedness, her findings: 40% of the 10% of the population who are left handed, have a brain neurology that is just an opposite mirror of the 90% of right handers. 60% of left-handers, the people who have a higher proportion of perfect pitch, have “mixed hand preference”, in which they will switch off between hands for common tasks (switch hitters).  (My father broke his...

MRI images from a neurotypical control (left) and an adult with complete agenesis of the corpus callosum (right). The corpus callosum is indicated in red, fading as the fibers enter the hemispheres in order to suggest that they continue on. The anterior commissure is indicated by light aqua. The image illustrates the dramatic lack of inter hemispheric connections in callosal agenesis. Credit: Lynn Paul/Caltech (Medical Xpress)—Building on their prior work, a team of neuroscientists at Caltech now report that rare patients who are missing connections between the left and right sides of their brain—a condition known as agenesis of...

TALLAHASSEE, Fla., Oct. 4 (UPI) -- The brilliance of Albert Einstein's brain may have been down to unusually well-connected left and right hemispheres, U.S. and Chinese researchers say. Florida State University evolutionary anthropologist Dean Falk, using a technique developed by Weiwei Men of East China Normal University's Department of Physics, says the study was the first detailed look at Einstein's corpus callosum, the brain's largest bundle of fibers connecting the two cerebral hemispheres and facilitating interhemispheric communication.