Roger Sperry

Roger Sperry was an American neuropsychologist and neurobiologist known for his split brain research, which showed that the left and right hemispheres of the brain function as largely independent, conscious systems when the connection between them is severed. Working with patients whose corpus callosum had been surgically cut to control severe epilepsy, Sperry and his collaborators demonstrated that each hemisphere could perceive, think, remember, reason and will in its own right, often without the other hemisphere's awareness. He shared the 1981 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with David Hubel and Torsten Wiesel for his discoveries concerning the functional specialization of the cerebral hemispheres. Sperry earned his doctorate from the University of Chicago in 1941 under Paul Weiss, worked at the Yerkes Laboratories of Primate Biology at Harvard and then returned to Chicago, before moving in 1954 to the California Institute of Technology, where as Hixson Professor of Psychobiology he conducted his most famous experiments, working closely with graduate student Michael Gazzaniga, and remained until 1994.