Do your ever feel like your left hand doesn’t know what your right hand is doing?
This may be a good description of how you feel on days filled with lots of stress and aggravation. There may be just too many things for your brain to keep track of. A more accurate question would be – does your left brain know what your right brain is doing?
One of the ways your left and right brain hemispheres communicate with one another is through your corpus callosum.
The corpus callosum is that magical bundle of nerve fibers that connects your left and right brain hemispheres. There are over 200 million neuronal connections that are covered with myelin – that’s the fatty substance that enhances the flow of electrical messages.
It was first reported that women had a larger corpus callosum than men and that explained why women were better at multi-tasking and intuition. Recent research now indicates that the differences in size in relation to mental abilities are too complex to assign benefits to one gender over another.
But, here is what we do know. Severing the corpus callosum, which has been done in extreme cases of epileptic seizures, confirmed the location of the language center in the left hemisphere.
A patient with a severed corpus callosum is unable it verbally identify an object that is recognizable in the left field of vision. This is because the left brain hemisphere contains the speech center and the right brain hemisphere processes information from the left visual field.
What was also revealed is that both hemispheres of the brain have their own areas of specialty. This is how we have come to understand that in general the left hemisphere is more analytical, logical and mathematical and the right hemisphere is more spatial and intutive as well as having greater face recognition, visual imagery and musical orientation.
And, this leads us right back to the discussion about the brain differences between men and women.
While the size of the corpus callosum might not explain gender brain differences completely, women still know there is a difference because – they are willing to read a map and men will say they don’t need one.
By Joyce Hansen
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