Roger Sperry
From Psy3241
Roger Wolcott Sperry (August 20, 1913 – April 17, 1994) was a neuropsychologist, neurobiologist and Nobel laureate who, with two fellow researchers, won the 1981 Nobel Prize in Medicine for his work with split-brain research.
Sperry was born and raised in Hartford, Connecticut. He was smart and talented enough that it earned him a scholarship to Oberlin College. He participated in sports and did well academically. He went on to graduate with an English degree, and soon would be back to earn his masters in psychology. Post masters, he went to the University of Chicago and earned his Ph.D in zoology.
Sperry did post-doctoral research with a well known psychologist Karl Lashley at Harvard University. After much research and experience teaching, he accepted a job as the prestigious Hixon professor of Psychobiology at California Institute of Technology in Pasadena (Caltech).
While at Caltech, Sperry pursued his interest in the routes by which information is transferred from one side of the cerebral cortex to the other. After a series of experiments, Sperry and his colleagues discovered two possible routes for such interhemispheric transfer—the corpus callosum and the optic chiasm. However, he found that ablating both the corpus callosum or the optic chiasm before training did not interfere with transfer. A brain that has had its corpus callosum and its optic chiasm ablated is referred to as a split-brain preparation.
The additional knowledge provided by Sperry and his colleagues was dramatic. They found that each hemisphere had its own characteristic range of cognition, memory, emotion, and consciousness. Sperry leading the way, research on the “left brain” and the “right brain” became very popular. There were some controversies with this later into his career but much research was done to prove otherwise. The left hemisphere is responsible for speech, as had been known, and it is dominant in all activities involving language, arithmetic, and analysis. The right hemisphere, although mute and capable only of simple addition (up to about 20), is superior to the left hemisphere in, among other things, spatial comprehension--in understanding maps, for example, or recognizing faces.
In his lifetime, Sperry published almost 300 articles in the most prestigious journals and many of those articles were translated into several languages (Puente, 1995).
Sperry past away on April 17, 1994, in Pasadena, California. He was 80 years old and cause of death was a degenerative neuromuscular disorder (Puente, 1995).
Awards & Honors
Karl Lashley Award of the American Philosophical Society (1976)
The Wolf Prize in Medicine (1979)
The Ralph Gerard Award from the Society of Neuroscience (1979)
The Nobel Prize in medicine/physiology (shared with David Hubel and Torsten Wiesel) (1981)
The Lifetime Achievement Award from the APA (1993)
Personal Life
In 1949, Sperry married Norma Gay Deupree. They had one son, Glenn Michael, and one daughter, Janet Hope.
