Cogniie, Creier, Comportament / Cognition, Brain, Behavior Copyright 2006 Romanian Association for Cognitive Science.

. All rights reserved. ISSN: 1224-8398 Volume X, No. 2 (June), 159-161

EDITORIAL: BRAIN ASYMMETRY IN DEVELOPMENT, PSYCHOPATHOLOGY AND EVOLUTION

Joseph B. HELLIGE *
University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, USA

I was delighted to receive an invitation from Andrei Miu to prepare an article for this special issue of Cognition, Brain, Behavior, for which my long-time USC colleague, Joe Bogen was serving as Guest Editor. Given Joes seminal contributions to study of the split-brain patients (see Eran Zaidels article in this issue), it seemed especially fitting that the theme of the special issue would be brain asymmetry in psychopathology, development and evolution. Having readily accepted the invitation, I had just begun to work on my contribution when we learned of Joes passing. When Andrei asked if I would step in as a co-Guest Editor, I agreed to help in whatever way I could to see this timely project through to completion. As you can see, the result is a set of provocative articles by an international cast of fine scholars. We have known for a long time that the left and right sides of the cerebral cortex are functionally asymmetric in humans. Nothing has done more to illustrate the profound nature of that asymmetry than the pioneering study of split-brain patients by Roger Sperry, Joe Bogen and their colleagues, work for which Sperry received the Nobel Prize in 1982. The value of understanding the brains functional asymmetry, or laterality, goes far beyond an attempt to localize perceptual, cognitive and emotional processes in the brain. Indeed, with respect to localization it is now possible to be far more precise than to simply indicate whether one hemisphere is superior to the other. Instead, the brains laterality constitutes an emergent organizational property that is no less important to understand today than it was 50 years ago when Bogen and Sperry first met. During the intervening years, much has been learned about the nature of laterality, the manner in which it may have emerged during the course of evolution, the manner in which it develops over the life span of an individual and how individual differences in lateralization may
*

Corresponding author: Dr. Joseph B. Hellige, Department of Psychology, SGM 502, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, California 90089-1061, USA. E-mail: hellige@usc.edu.

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be related to individual differences in cognitive abilities, propensities and pathology. The articles in this special issue provide a snapshot of what we have learned so far and, of even more importance, a glimpse of what the future holds. It seems fitting to begin by reprinting one of Bogens last articles, discussing Sperrys philosophy of mind. As always, Bogen did not shy away from the truly big issues, in this case the emergence of consciousness and the relationship between mind and brain. Though prepared as an exposition on Sperrys views, Bogens article inevitably articulates his own view of the manner in which mind arises from brain. It is noteworthy that the ideas articulated in that article remain timely. Something of both Bogens views and personality are nicely captured in one of his footnotes: When I argued this [a particular view of the mind-brain relationship] with Paul Churchland he exclaimed Throughout the history of this subject [certainly since Descartes] the mind has been considered to be between God and brain. But now you presume to put the brain between God and mind. Exactly so, which is how I can be a committed physicalist while remaining agnostic (or even indifferent) about the immaterial. When Bogen and Sperry began working together, laterality was thought to be either uniquely human or so qualitatively different in humans that the few cases where it existed in other contemporary species were unlikely to shed light on how it emerged in our own species. That view has changed dramatically, especially within the last 20 years. The article by Vallortigara and Regolin reviews the ubiquity of brain lateralization in non-human animals. They note striking similarities between laterality in humans and other species, similarities that may have profound implications for both ontogeny and phylogeny. The fact that some forms of laterality are ubiquitous across species and, thus, likely to be quite old in evolutionary terms suggests that there are computational advantages of separating complementary processes into two sides of the brain, an idea explored in my own article (Hellige, this issue). Of course, human laterality differs in important ways from that of even our own closest primate relatives, leading to consideration of the manner in which several important milestones in human evolution shaped laterality into the pattern characteristic of contemporary humans. A particularly influential theory regarding the emergence of laterality both ontogenetically and phylogenetically has been the right shift theory first proposed by Marian Annett nearly 30 years ago. In her article in this issue, Annett reviews the right shift theory, arguing that the RS+ gene [which induces an advantage for the left hemisphere by weakening the right hemisphere] is specific to humans, creating something of an evolutionary discontinuity with other species. Her article also considers the role of the RS+ gene and various mutations of that gene for development and psychopathology.

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The article by Simic, Mladinov, Juda and Hof reviews anatomical brain asymmetries related to language with emphasis on entorhinal cortex and basel forebrain. As they demonstrate, anatomical asymmetries can be used to shed light on the evolutionary foundations of laterality and language, on the possible similarity across species and on correlates of disturbed development of hemispheric asymmetry and asymmetric brain damage. The article by Papousek and Schulter notes how contemporary neuropsychological models of affect and affective disorders have served to revive interest in functional hemispheric asymmetry. They discuss a variety of issues that must be considered in the investigation of hemispheric asymmetry for emotion and for studies that relate individual differences in laterality to psychopathology. The article by Lohr, Caligiuri, Sponheim, Dean and Cortese reviews evidence for lateralized abnormalities in schizophrenia, especially abnormalities in the left hemisphere. More specifically, they present new analyses to show that, relative to a control group, schizophrenic patients and their first-degree family members have difficulty maintaining a steady-state force with their right hand (left hemisphere), possibly related to asymmetrical functioning of the basal ganglia. The article by Fritzsche, Fritzsche, Kosidubova, Prognimak and Mayorov also discusses the relationship between brain asymmetry and schizophrenia, as well as implications for the development and evolution of functional brain asymmetry. In particular, they consider how asymmetric stimulation of left and right visual fields might serve to introduce hemispheric differences for processing aspects of visual stimuli, how a novel task may switch from right- to left-hemisphere dominance with practice and how a mathematical measure derived from information theory (Kolmogorov entropy) can be used to study these phenomena as well as relationships between laterality and psychopathology. As the title of this journal implies, cognition, brain and behavior are intertwined. The goal of cognitive neuroscience is to unravel the relationships so as to understand how our cognitions and behaviors arise from brain. As Bogens article indicates, there is also a sense in which emergent properties like what he and Sperry term mentation may, in turn, influence elements of neural activity. The articles in this special issue remind us that left/right brain asymmetry constitutes an important emergent property that we share to some extent with other species and that is related to our cognitive development and to psychopathology. As such, understanding hemispheric asymmetry and the manner in which the two hemispheres interact to produce unified performance will continue to be an important component in understanding the relationships among cognition, brain and behavior.