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Bridging Hemispheres

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A Brain for Speech

Abstract

The corpus callosum is a large axon tract that transfers information between both hemispheres. I discuss the evolutionary and developmental origin of interhemispheric fibers in mammals, proposing that these connections integrate a divided representation of the sensory and motor fields in both cerebral hemispheres. Furthermore, interhemispheric transmission becomes problematic in species with large brains, as the distance between hemispheres increases and consequently the transmission time delay is larger. This constraint has been proposed to favor hemispheric specialization in species with large brains, in which processing will be more effectively executed in only one hemisphere. Recent evidence indicates that the corpus callosum plays an important role in the coordination and synchronization of both hemispheres during lateralized language processing.

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  1. Department of Psychiatry, Medical School, and Interdisciplinary Center for Neuroscience, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, Santiago, Chile

    Francisco Aboitiz

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Aboitiz, F. (2017). Bridging Hemispheres. In: A Brain for Speech. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-54060-7_5

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