On this date in 1913, Nobel Prize winner Roger Sperry was born in Hartford, Connecticut. He won a Nobel Prize in 1981 in physiology or medicine, for his more than four decades-long study of the human brain. Sperry found that the two cerebral hemispheres of the brain have separate functions, linked by the corpus callosum, the nerve bundle that connects them. He also discovered that the left side is usually the more dominant; it controls reasoning, language, writing and reading. The typically less-dominant right side controls such non-verbal pursuits as art, music and other creative activities. Sperry received his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago. He first studied cats and later studied epileptic patients, especially those whose corpus callosum was cut to block seizures.

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