Left Brain, Right Brain — The Man Whose Two Hands Disagreed

There was a woman in Los Angeles, in the spring of nineteen sixty-two, who had begun to watch her husband's hands. Not his face, which was the same face. The hands. In the evenings he would reach for the newspaper the way he had for twenty years, and his right hand would pick it up, and his left hand would take it from him and put it down again — quite firmly, as if the two of them had not been consulted about the same decision. She told the doctors. One of them wrote it down, and it is in the record to this day. Tonight is the left brain and the right brain — the two halves everybody has heard of, the logical one and the creative one, and the quiz that tells you which one you are. The tale first, at full strength: a plain room in Pasadena with a screen four feet square, a shutter that opens for a tenth of a second — faster than an eye can move out of the way — and a man who says he saw nothing while his hidden left hand comes back holding the thing he never saw. A boy asked why he chose a snow shovel who answers, without pausing, that you need one to clean out the chicken shed. Then the argument, still running. Two Italian patients whose perception was split while the person, their testers argue, was not. A reply from the graduate student who ran the first shutter, now an old man. And in twenty twenty, twelve authors from both camps agreeing in one flat sentence that after sixty years the evidence cannot decide whether there is one mind in there or two. Then the record, quieter and stranger than the legend — the towel on the table and the cloth fringe on the shield, put there so one half of a man could not overhear the other; the second room, fourteen years later, that the story always forgets is a different room; and the boy's famous two answers, which were never two answers to one question at all. And at the end, why it survived: a surgeon who named the halves in 1969, a paper that turned a task into a type of person in 1972, and a Sunday magazine in September 1973 that printed it in the plural of persons. Ninety-one per cent of British teachers still say it is true. A calm, unhurried telling of the record, for sleep, rest, or a long drive in the dark. Nothing here will startle you or wake you.