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01-03-2022 | Editorial

Asymmetry of brain structure and function: 40 years after Sperry’s Nobel Prize

Authors: Michel Thiebaut de Schotten, Christian F. Beckmann

Published in: Brain Structure and Function | Issue 2/2022

Excerpt

Since Roger Sperry’s Nobel Prize (1981; see also Sperry 1974) for his discoveries of the functional specialisation of the cerebral hemispheres, significant theoretical and methodological advances have improved the quantitative characterisation of functional and structural markers of brain asymmetries. For instance, we now know that this is the disproportionate increase in brain size that led human brain evolution to distribute functions unevenly between the left and the right hemispheres (Ringo et al. 1994; Vallortigara and Rogers 2005; Karolis et al. 2019) to optimise brain processing time (Ringo et al. 1994). However, this hemispheric functional specialisation is at the expense of resilience against brain injury (Forkel et al. 2014; Bartolomeo and Thiebaut de Schotten 2016). …

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Title: Asymmetry of brain structure and function: 40 years after Sperry’s Nobel Prize
Authors: Michel Thiebaut de Schotten
Christian F. Beckmann
Publication date: 01-03-2022
Publisher: Springer Berlin Heidelberg
Published in: Brain Structure and Function / Issue 2/2022
Print ISSN: 1863-2653
Electronic ISSN: 1863-2661
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00429-021-02426-1

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Asymmetry of brain structure and function: 40 years after Sperry’s Nobel Prize

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Intra- and interhemispheric symmetry of subcortical brain structures: a volumetric analysis in the aging human brain