cover image Of Two Minds: The Revolutionary Science of Dual Brain Psychology

Of Two Minds: The Revolutionary Science of Dual Brain Psychology

Fredric Schiffer, Frederic Schiffer. Free Press, $25 (288pp) ISBN 978-0-684-85424-3

Taking cues from 19th-century English physician Arthur Wigan (whose seemingly normal friend, it turned out when autopsied, had only a single brain hemisphere), contemporary neuroscience asks whether normal people, who possess both left and right brains, can be said to be literally of two minds. Schiffer, an associate attending psychiatrist at McLean Hospital and a Harvard Medical School psychiatry instructor, believes the answer is a resounding yes, and argues that psychiatric disorders are best understood as the unhappy result of two warring brain halves. Transcripts of psychotherapy sessions Schiffer conducted while his patients wore specially designed goggles that allowed them to see out of only one hemisphere at a time support this sci-fi-sounding thesis, as do some--but by no means all--studies pertaining to hemispheric specialization (shifts in ear temperatures, for example, correlate with shifts in EEGs). Unfortunately, while provocative, the patient transcripts, which form the linchpin of the evidence, are bland and curiously unconvincing, and Schiffer's therapy techniques seemingly await further clinical trials. Readers not yet familiar with the famous studies of so-called ""split-brain patients""--epilepsy sufferers whose corpora callosa were severed in an experimental therapy technique in the 1960s--may find Schiffer's review of that material, and his reports from his own work with some of those patients, the most interesting portions of the book. (Sept.)