Differing emotional response from right and left hemispheres

Abstract

To study what might be called the ‘emotional vision’ of the right and left hemispheres of the human brain, a specially designed contact lens was used to show cine films to the right or left hemisphere only. Films were chosen to provoke different kinds of emotional response. We wished to find whether the two hemispheres would take and utilise the stimulus of the film to generate a different emotional response despite the common input. In recent years clinical and experimental data have supported the hypothesis that different emotional reactions follow damage to the right or the left hemisphere^1–5. We report here the first part of an investigation in which films were perceived by different hemispheres in normal subjects and the subjects were then asked to judge and rate the films. There is of course no intention of suggesting that information implanted at one hemisphere cannot be transferred to the other^6,7; nevertheless, the basis of this research is that the two hemispheres can differ in their vision of the world and that each in some respects formulates its own separate and distinct emotional vision of what it sees. We seek to answer the question of what visual experience is like when that which the subject sees enters his nervous system on only one half of his brain, but this is part of the much wider question of how the two hemispheres of the brain see the world and of the relationship between the two visual halves of the brain.