Tag: Psychologist

On This Day … 14 May

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People (Births)

  • 1901 – Robert Ritter, German psychologist and physician (d. 1951).

Robert Ritter

Robert Ritter (14 May 1901 to 15 April 1951) was a German racial scientist doctor of psychology and medicine, with a background in child psychiatry and the biology of criminality.

In 1936, Ritter was appointed head of the Racial Hygiene and Demographic Biology Research Unit of Nazi Germany’s Criminal Police, to establish the genealogical histories of the German “Gypsies”, both Roma and Sinti, and became the “architect of the experiments Roma and Sinti were subjected to.”

His pseudo-scientific “research” in classifying these populations of Germany aided the Nazi government in their systematic persecution toward a goal of “racial purity”.

On This Day … 13 May

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People (Births)

  • 1895 – Nandor Fodor, Hungarian-American psychologist, parapsychologist, and author (d. 1964).

People (Deaths)

  • 2013 – Joyce Brothers, American psychologist, author, and actress (b. 1927).

Nandor Fodor

Nandor Fodor (13 May 1895 to 17 May 1964 in New York City, New York) was a British and American parapsychologist, psychoanalyst, author and journalist of Hungarian origin.

Fodor was born in Beregszász, Hungary. He received a doctorate in law from the Royal Hungarian University of Science in Budapest. He moved to New York to work as a journalist and to Britain in 1929 where he worked for a newspaper company.

Fodor was one of the leading authorities on poltergeists, haunting and paranormal phenomena usually associated with mediumship. Fodor, who was at one time Sigmund Freud’s associate, wrote on subjects like prenatal development and dream interpretation, but is credited mostly for his magnum opus, Encyclopaedia of Psychic Science, first published in 1934. Fodor was the London correspondent for the American Society for Psychical Research (1935-1939). He worked as an editor for the Psychoanalytic Review and was a member of the New York Academy of Sciences.

Fodor in the 1930s embraced paranormal phenomena but by the 1940s took a break from his previous work and advocated a psychoanalytic approach to psychic phenomena. He published sceptical newspaper articles on mediumship, which caused opposition from spiritualists.

Among the subjects he closely studied was the case of Gef the talking mongoose.

Joyce Brothers

Joyce Diane Brothers (20 October 1927 to 13 May 2013) was an American psychologist, television personality, advice columnist, and writer. She first became famous in 1955 for winning the top prize on the American game show The $64,000 Question. Her fame from the game show allowed her to go on to host various advice columns and television shows, which established her as a pioneer in the field of “pop (popular) psychology”.

Brothers is often credited as the first to normalise psychological concepts to the American mainstream. Her syndicated columns were featured in newspapers and magazines, including a monthly column for Good Housekeeping, in which she contributed for nearly 40 years. As Brothers quickly became the “face of psychology” for American audiences, she often appeared in various television roles, usually as herself. From the 1970s onward, she also began to accept fictional roles that parodied her “woman psychologist” persona. She is noted for working continuously for five decades across various genres. Numerous groups recognised Brothers for her strong leadership as a woman in the psychological field and for helping to destigmatise the profession overall.

On This Day … 12 May

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People (Deaths)

Erik Erikson

Erik Homburger Erikson (born Erik Salomonsen; 15 June 1902 to 12 May 1994) was a German-American developmental psychologist and psychoanalyst known for his theory on psychological development of human beings.

He may be most famous for coining the phrase identity crisis.

His son, Kai T. Erikson, is a noted American sociologist.

Despite lacking a bachelor’s degree, Erikson served as a professor at prominent institutions, including Harvard, University of California, Berkeley, and Yale. A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Erikson as the 12th most cited psychologist of the 20th century.

Psychoanalytic Experience and Training

When Erikson was twenty-five, his friend Peter Blos invited him to Vienna to tutor art at the small Burlingham-Rosenfeld School for children whose affluent parents were undergoing psychoanalysis by Sigmund Freud’s daughter, Anna Freud. Anna noticed Erikson’s sensitivity to children at the school and encouraged him to study psychoanalysis at the Vienna Psychoanalytic Institute, where prominent analysts August Aichhorn, Heinz Hartmann, and Paul Federn were among those who supervised his theoretical studies. He specialised in child analysis and underwent a training analysis with Anna Freud. Helene Deutsch and Edward Bibring supervised his initial treatment of an adult. Simultaneously he studied the Montessori method of education, which focused on child development and sexual stages. In 1933 he received his diploma from the Vienna Psychoanalytic Institute. This and his Montessori diploma were to be Erikson’s only earned academic credentials for his life’s work.

On This Day … 09 May

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People (Births)

  • 1893 – William Moulton Marston, American psychologist and author (d. 1947).

People (Deaths)

  • 2012 – Bertram Cohler, American psychologist, psychoanalyst, and academic (b. 1938).

William Moulton Marston

William Moulton Marston (09 May 1893 to 02 May 1947), also known by the pen name Charles Moulton, was an American psychologist who, with his wife Elizabeth Holloway, invented an early prototype of the lie detector. He was also known as a self-help author and comic book writer who created the character Wonder Woman.

Two women, his wife Elizabeth Holloway Marston, and their polyamorous life partner, Olive Byrne, greatly influenced Wonder Woman’s creation.

He was inducted into the Comic Book Hall of Fame in 2006.

Psychologist and Inventor

Marston was the creator of the systolic blood pressure test, which became one component of the modern polygraph invented by John Augustus Larson in Berkeley, California. Marston’s wife, Elizabeth Holloway Marston, suggested a connection between emotion and blood pressure to William, observing that, “[w]hen she got mad or excited, her blood pressure seemed to climb”.

Although Elizabeth is not listed as Marston’s collaborator in his early work, Lamb, Matte (1996), and others refer directly and indirectly to Elizabeth’s own work on her husband’s research. She also appears in a picture taken in his laboratory in the 1920s (reproduced by Marston, 1938).

Marston set out to commercialise Larson’s invention of the polygraph, when he subsequently embarked on a career in entertainment and comic book writing and appeared as a salesman in ads for Gillette Razors, using a polygraph motif. From his psychological work, Marston became convinced that women were more honest than men in certain situations and could work faster and more accurately. During his lifetime, Marston championed the latent abilities and causes of the women of his day.

Marston was also a writer of essays in popular psychology. And he published a 1928 book Emotions of Normal People, a defence of many sexual taboos, using much of Byrne’s original research she had done for her doctorate. He dedicated the work to her, Holloway, his mother, his aunt, and Huntley. It received almost no attention from the rest of the academic community other than a review, written by Byrne herself, under her alternative name Olive Richard in The Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology.

Emotions of Normal People also elaborated on the DISC Theory. Marston viewed people behaving along two axes, with their attention being either passive or active, depending on the individual’s perception of his or her environment as either favourable or antagonistic. By placing the axes at right angles, four quadrants form, with each describing a behavioural pattern:

  • Dominance produces activity in an antagonistic environment.
  • Inducement produces activity in a favourable environment.
  • Submission produces passivity in a favourable environment.
  • Compliance produces passivity in an antagonistic environment.

Marston posited that there is a masculine notion of freedom that is inherently anarchic and violent and an opposing feminine notion based on “Love Allure” that leads to an ideal state of submission to loving authority.

Bertram Cohler

Bertram Joseph Cohler (03 December 1938 to 09 May 2012) was an American psychologist, psychoanalyst, and educator primarily associated with the University of Chicago, the Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis, and Harvard University. He advocated a life course approach to understanding human experience and subjectivity, drawing on insights from psychoanalysis, developmental psychology, personology, psychological anthropology, narrative studies, and the interdisciplinary field of human development.

Cohler authored or co-authored over 200 articles and books. He contributed to numerous scholarly fields, including the study of adversity, resilience and coping; mental illness and treatment; family and social relations in normal development and mental illness; and the study of personal narrative in social and historical context. He made particular contributions to the study of sexual identity over the life course, to the psychoanalytic understanding of homosexuality, and to the study of personal narratives of Holocaust survivors.

Other than his graduate study at Harvard, Cohler spent his career at the University of Chicago and affiliated institutions, where he was repeatedly recognized as an educator and a builder of bridges across disciplines.

He was treated for oesophageal cancer in 2011, but became ill from a related pneumonia and died on 09 May 2012 not far from his home in Hyde Park, Chicago.

On This Day … 02 May

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People (Births)

  • 1946 – Peter L. Benson, American psychologist and academic (d. 2011).

Peter L. Benson

Peter Lorimer Benson (02 May 1946 to 02 October 2011) was a psychologist and CEO/President of Search Institute. He pioneered the developmental assets framework, which became the predominant approach to research on positive facets of youth development.

According to Scales and Roehlkepartain (2012, p.322):

When [Benson] introduced the developmental assets [approach] in 1989, the predominant approach to youth development was naming youth problems and trying to prevent them. In contrast, the assets approach focused on building strengths. The developmental assets framework became the predominant positive youth development approach in the world, cited more than 17,000 times, and the framework and surveys developed to measure the assets have been used with more than 3 million youths in more than 60 countries.

Reference

Scales, P.C. & Roehlkepartain, E.C. (2012) Peter Lorimer Benson (1946-2011). American Psychologist. 67(4), pp.322. doi:10.1037/a0028171

On This Day … 01 April

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People (Births)

  • 1851 – Laza Lazarević, Serbian psychiatrist and neurologist (d. 1891).

People (Deaths)

  • 2005 – Kenneth Clark, American psychologist and academic (b. 1914).

Laza Lazarevic

Lazar “Laza” Lazarević (Serbian Cyrillic: Лазаp Лаза Лазаревић, 13 May 1851 to 10 January 1891) was a Serbian physician writer, psychiatrist, and neurologist.

The primary interest of Lazarević throughout his short life was the science of medicine. In that field, he was one of the greatest figures of his time, pre-eminently distinguished and useful as a doctor, teacher, and writer on both medical issues as well as literary themes. To him, literature was an avocation; yet he was talented at it and thought of himself as a man of letters. He translated the works of Nikolay Chernyshevsky and Ivan Turgenev into Serbian.

Few writers have achieved fame with such a small opus as Lazarević, for it rests on nine stories; yet he is considered one of the best Serbian writers of the nineteenth century. He was often referred to as the Serbian Turgenev. During his brief life, “the less than prolific opus” enshrined him in Serbian literature as a writer who introduced the psychological story genre.

Kenneth Clark

Kenneth Bancroft Clark (14 July 1914 to 01 May 2005) and Mamie Phipps Clark (18 April 1917 to August 1983) were American psychologists who as a married team conducted research among children and were active in the Civil Rights Movement. They founded the Northside Centre for Child Development in Harlem and the organization Harlem Youth Opportunities Unlimited (HARYOU). Kenneth Clark was also an educator and professor at City College of New York, and first Black president of the American Psychological Association.

They were known for their 1940s experiments using dolls to study children’s attitudes about race. The Clarks testified as expert witnesses in Briggs v. Elliott (1952), one of five cases combined into Brown v. Board of Education (1954). The Clarks’ work contributed to the ruling of the US Supreme Court in which it determined that de jure racial segregation in public education was unconstitutional. Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote in the Brown v. Board of Education opinion, “To separate them from others of similar age and qualifications solely because of their race generates a feeling of inferiority as to their status in the community that may affect their hearts and minds in a way unlikely to ever be undone.”

Early Life and Education

Kenneth Clark was born in the Panama Canal Zone to Arthur Bancroft Clark and Miriam Hanson Clark. His father worked as an agent for the United Fruit Company. When he was five, his parents separated and his mother took him and his younger sister Beulah to the US to live in Harlem in New York City. She worked as a seamstress in a sweatshop, where she later organized a union and became a shop steward for the International Ladies Garment Workers Union. Clark moved to New York City while the ethnic diversity of Harlem was disappearing, and his school was predominantly black. Clark was trained to learn a trade, as were most black students at this time. Miriam wanted more for her son and transferred him to George Washington High School in Upper Manhattan. Clark graduated from high school in 1931 (Jones & Pettigrew, 2005).

Clark attended Howard University, a historically black university, where he first studied political science with professors including Ralph Johnson Bunche. During his years at Howard University, he worked under the influence of mentor Francis Cecil Sumner, the first African American to receive a doctorate in psychology. He returned in 1935 for a master’s in psychology. Clark was a distinguished member of Kappa Alpha Psi fraternity. After earning his master’s degree, Sumner directed Clark to Columbia University to work with another influential mentor, Otto Klineberg (Jones & Pettigrew, 2005).

While studying psychology for his doctorate at Columbia University, Clark did research in support of the study of race relations by Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal, who wrote An American Dilemma. In 1940, Clark was the first African American to earn a Ph.D. in psychology from Columbia University.

Career

During the summer of 1941, after Clark was already asked to teach a summer session at City College of New York, the Dean of Hampton Institute asked Clark to start a department of psychology there. In 1942 Kenneth Clark became the first African-American tenured full professor at the City College of New York. Clark also started a psychology department at Hampton Institute in 1942 and taught a few courses within the department. In 1966 he was the first African American appointed to the New York State Board of Regents and the first African American to be president of the American Psychological Association.

Much of Clark’s work came as a response to his involvement in the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education US Supreme Court desegregation decision. Lawyers Jack Greenberg and Robert L. Carter, with resources and funding from the American Jewish Committee (AJC) and Topeka Jewish Community Relations Bureau, hired Clark to present his work on the effects of segregation on children. After the Brown v. Board of Education case, Clark was still dissatisfied by the lack of progress in school desegregation in New York City. In a 1964 interview with Robert Penn Warren for the book Who Speaks for the Negro?, Clark expressed his doubts about the efficacy of certain busing programs in desegregating the public schools. Clark also felt very discouraged by the lack of social welfare organizations to address race and poverty issues. Clark argued that a new approach had to be developed to involve poor blacks, in order to gain the political and economic power needed to solve their problems. Clark called his new approach “internal colonialism”, with hope that the Kennedy-Johnson administration’s War on Poverty would address problems of increasing social isolation, economic dependence and declining municipal services for many African Americans (Freeman, 2008).

Clark in 1962 was among the founders of Harlem Youth Opportunities Unlimited (HARYOU), an organisation devoted to developing educational and job opportunities. With HARYOU, Clark conducted an extensive sociological study of Harlem. He measured IQ scores, crime frequency, age frequency of the population, drop-out rates, church and school locations, quality of housing, family incomes, drugs, STD rates, homicides, and a number of other areas. It recruited educational experts to help to reorganize Harlem schools, create preschool classes, tutor older students after school, and job opportunities for youth who dropped out. The Johnson administration earmarked more than $100 million for the organisation. When it was placed under the administration of a pet project of Congressman Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. in 1964, the two men clashed over appointment of a director and its direction.

Clark used HARYOU to press for changes to the educational system to help improve black children’s performance. While he at first supported decentralisation of city schools, after a decade of experience, Clark believed that this option had not been able to make an appreciable difference and described the experiment as a “disaster.”

Following race riots in the summer of 1967, US President Lyndon Johnson appointed the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders (Kerner Commission). The Commission called Clark among the first experts to testify on urban issues. In 1973, Clark testified in the trial of Ruchell Magee.

Clark retired from City College in 1975, but remained an active advocate for integration throughout his life, serving on the board of the New York Civil Rights Coalition, of which he was Chairman Emeritus until his death. He opposed separatists and argued for high standards in education, continuing to work for children’s benefit. He consulted to city school systems across the country, and argued that all children should learn to use Standard English in school.

On This Day … 30 April

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People (Births)

  • 1857 – Eugen Bleuler, Swiss psychiatrist and eugenicist (d. 1940).
  • 1878 – Władysław Witwicki, Polish psychologist, philosopher, translator, historian (of philosophy and art) and artist (d. 1948).
  • 1930 – Félix Guattari, French psychotherapist and philosopher (d. 1992).

Eugen Bleuler

Paul Eugen Bleuler (30 April 1857 to 15 July 1939) was a Swiss psychiatrist and eugenicist most notable for his contributions to the understanding of mental illness.

He coined many psychiatric terms, such as “schizophrenia”, “schizoid”, “autism”, depth psychology and what Sigmund Freud called “Bleuler’s happily chosen term ambivalence”.

Bleuler studied medicine in Zürich. He trained for his psychiatric residency at Waldau Hospital under Gottileb Burckhardt, a Swiss psychiatrist, from 1881-1884. He left his job in 1884 and spent one year on medical study trips with Jean-Martin Charcot, a French neurologist in Paris, Bernhard von Gudden, a German psychiatrist in Munich, and to London. After these trips, he returned to Zürich to briefly work as assistant to Auguste Forel while completing his psychiatric residency at the Burghölzli, a university hospital.

Bleuler became the director of a psychiatric clinic in Rheinau, a hospital located in an old monastery on an island in the Rhine. At the time, the clinic was known for being functionally backward and largely ineffective. Because of this, Bleuler set about improving conditions for the patients residing there.

In the year 1898, Bleuler returned to the Burghölzli and became a psychiatry professor at Burghölzli, the same university hospital he completed his residency. He was also appointed director of the mental asylum in Rheinau. He served as the director from the years 1898 to 1927. While working at this asylum, Bleuler cared for long-term psychiatric patients. He also implemented both psychoanalytic treatment and research, and was influenced by Sigmund Freud.

During his time as the director of psychiatry at Burghölzli, Bleuler made great contributions to the field of psychiatry and psychology that made him known today. Because of these findings, Bleuler has been described as one of the most influential Swiss psychiatrists.

Wladyslaw Witwicki

Władysław Witwicki (30 April 1878 to 21 December 1948)] was a Polish psychologist, philosopher, translator, historian (of philosophy and art) and artist. He is seen as one of the fathers of psychology in Poland.

Witwicki was also the creator of the theory of cratism, theory of feelings, and he dealt with the issues of the psychology of religion, and the creation of secular ethics. He was one of the initiators and co-founders of Polish Philosophical Society. He is one of the thinkers associated with the Lwów-Warsaw school.

Witwicki is the author of the first Polish textbooks on psychology. He also collaborated with other philosophers. For instance, he worked with Bronisław Bandrowski to develop a model of psychology based on Franz Brentano’s theory on phenomenology. It included an analysis of Edmund Husserl’s Theory of Content and the Phenomenon of Thinking.

In the comments to his own translation of the Gospels of Matthew and Mark – Dobra Nowina według Mateusza i Marka (The Good News according to Matthew and Mark) – Witwicki challenges the mental health of Jesus. He attributed to Jesus subjectivism, increased sense of his own power and superiority over others, egocentrism and the tendency to subjugate other people, as well as difficulties communicating with the outside world and multiple personality disorder, which made him a schizothymic or even schizophrenic type (according to the Ernst Kretschmer’s typology).

Felix Guattari

Pierre-Félix Guattari (30 April 1930 to 29 August 1992) was a French psychotherapist, philosopher, semiologist, activist and screenwriter.

He founded both schizoanalysis and ecosophy, and is best known for his intellectual collaborations with Gilles Deleuze, most notably Anti-Oedipus (1972) and A Thousand Plateaus (1980), the two volumes of Capitalism and Schizophrenia.

On This Day … 24 April

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People (Births)

People (Deaths)

  • 1924 – G. Stanley Hall, American psychologist and academic (b. 1844).
  • 1983 – Erol Güngör, Turkish sociologist, psychologist, and academic (b. 1938).

Eliana Gil

Eliana Gil RPT-S, ATR (born 24 April 1948), is a lecturer, writer, and clinician of marriage, family and child. She is on the board of a number of professional counselling organisations that use play and art therapies, and she is the former president of the Association for Play Therapy (APT).

Dr. Gil is the senior partner of the Gil Institute for Trauma Recovery and Education in Fairfax, Virginia. She is also the director of Starbright Training Institute for Child and Family Play Therapy based in northern Virginia.

G. Stanley Hall

Granville Stanley Hall (01 February 1846 to 24 April 1924) was a pioneering American psychologist and educator. His interests focused on childhood development and evolutionary theory.

Hall was the first president of the American Psychological Association and the first president of Clark University.

Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Hall as the 72nd most cited psychologist of the 20th century, in a tie with Lewis Terman.

Erol Gungor

Erol Güngör (25 November 1938 to 24 April 1983) was a Turkish sociologist, psychologist, and writer.

After spending a period in the Faculty of Law, Güngör graduated from the Faculty of Literature and Social Sciences of Istanbul University in 1961. He received his Ph.D. in 1965 with a thesis titled “Kelâmî (Verbal) Yapılarda Estetik Organizasyon”. Kenneth Hammond invited him to visit the University of Colorado. He became an associate professor with his thesis titled “Şahıslar arası Ihtilafların Çözümünde Lisanın Rolü” in 1970. He became an academic in the Faculty of Literature and Social Sciences of Istanbul University in 1975. He eventually became the president of Selçuk University in 1982.

He mostly studied culture, personality, customs, people and religion. He focused on the identity and cultural problems which Turkish people have faced in the last 150 years.

On This Day … 22 April

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People (Births)

  • 1884 – Otto Rank, Austrian-American psychologist and academic (d. 1939).

Otto Rank

Otto Rank (22 April 1884 to 31 October 1939) was an Austrian psychoanalyst, writer, and teacher.

Born in Vienna, he was one of Sigmund Freud’s closest colleagues for 20 years, a prolific writer on psychoanalytic themes, editor of the two leading analytic journals of the era, managing director of Freud’s publishing house, and a creative theorist and therapist.

In 1926, Rank left Vienna for Paris and, for the remainder of his life, led a successful career as a lecturer, writer, and therapist in France and the United States.

On This Day … 17 April

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People (Deaths)

  • 1994 – Roger Wolcott Sperry, American psychologist and biologist, Nobel Prize laureate (b. 1913).

Roger Wolcott Sperry

Roger Wolcott Sperry (20 August 1913 to 17 April 1994) was an American neuropsychologist, neurobiologist and Nobel laureate who, together with David Hunter Hubel and Torsten Nils Wiesel, won the 1981 Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine for his work with split-brain research.

A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Sperry as the 44th most cited psychologist of the 20th century.

Education

Sperry was an English major, but he took an Intro to Psychology class taught by a Professor named R. H. Stetson who had worked with William James, the father of American Psychology. This class sparked Sperry’s interest in the brain and how it can change. Stetson was disabled and had trouble getting around so Sperry would help him out by driving him to and from wherever he needed to go. This included taking Stetson to lunch with his colleagues. Sperry would just sit at the end of the table and listen to Stetson and his colleagues discuss their research and other psychological interests. This increased Sperry’s interest in Psychology even more and after he received his undergraduate degree in English from Oberlin he decided to stay and get his master’s degree in Psychology. He received his bachelor’s degree in English in 1935 and a master’s degree in psychology in 1937. He received his Ph.D. in zoology from the University of Chicago in 1941, supervised by Paul A. Weiss. Sperry then did postdoctoral research with Karl Lashley at Harvard University though most of his time was spent with Lashley at the Yerkes Primate Research Centre in Orange Park, Florida.

Career

In 1942, Sperry began work at the Yerkes Laboratories of Primate Biology, then a part of Harvard University. There he focused on experiments involving the rearranging of motor and sensory nerves. He left in 1946 to become an assistant professor, and later associate professor, at the University of Chicago. In 1949, during a routine chest x-ray, there was evidence of tuberculosis. He was sent to Saranac Lake in the Adironack Mountains in New York for treatment. It was during this time when he began writing his concepts of the mind and brain, and was first published in the American Scientist in 1952. In 1952, he became the Section Chief of Neurological Diseases and Blindness at the National Institutes of Health and finished out the year at the Marine Biology Laboratory in Coral Gables, FL. Sperry went back to The University of Chicago in 1952 and became an Associate Professor of Psychology. He was not offered tenure at Chicago and planned to move to Bethesda, Maryland but was held up by a delay in construction at the National Institutes of Health. During this time Sperry’s friend Victor Hepburn invited him to lecture about his research at a symposium. There were professors from the California Institute of Technology in the audience of the symposium who, after listening to Sperry’s lecture, were so impressed with him they offered him a job as the Hixson Professor of Psychobiology. In 1954, he accepted the position as a professor at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech as Hixson Professor of Psychobiology) where he performed his most famous experiments with Joseph Bogen, MD and many students including Michael Gazzaniga.

Under the supervision of Paul Weiss while earning his Ph.D. at the University of Chicago, Sperry became interested in neuronal specificity and brain circuitry and began questioning the existing concepts about these two topics. He asked the simple question first asked in his Introduction to Psychology class at Oberlin: Nature or nurture? He began a series of experiments in an attempt to answer this question. Sperry crosswired the motor nerves of rats’ legs so the left nerve controlled the right leg and vice versa. He would then place the rats in a cage that had an electric grid on the bottom separated into four sections. Each leg of the rat was placed into one of the four sections of the electric grid. A shock was administered to a specific section of the grid, for example the grid where the rat’s left back leg was located would receive a shock. Every time the left paw was shocked the rat would lift his right paw and vice versa. Sperry wanted to know how long it would take the rat to realize he was lifting the wrong paw. After repeated tests Sperry found that the rats never learned to lift up the correct paw, leading him to the conclusion that some things are just hardwired and cannot be relearned. In Sperry’s words, “no adaptive functioning of the nervous system took place.” During Sperry’s postdoctoral years with Karl Lashley at Harvard and at the Yerkes Laboratories of Primate Biology in Orange Park, Florida, he continued his work on neuronal specificity that he had begun as a doctoral student and initiated a new series of studies involving salamanders. The optic nerves were sectioned and the eyes rotated 180 degrees. The question was whether vision would be normal after regeneration or would the animal forever view the world as “upside down” and right-left reversed. Should the latter prove to be the case, it would mean that the nerves were somehow “guided” back to their original sites of termination. Restoration of normal vision (i.e. “seeing” the world in a “right-side-up” orientation) would mean that the regenerating nerves had terminated in new sites, quite different from the original ones. The animals reacted as though the world was upside down and reversed from right to left. Furthermore, no amount of training could change the response. These studies, which provided strong evidence for nerve guidance by “intricate chemical codes under genetic control” (1963) culminated in Sperry’s chemoaffinity hypothesis (1951).

Sperry later served on the Board of Trustees and as Professor of Psychobiology Emeritus at California Institute of Technology. The Sperry Neuroscience Building at Oberlin College was named in his honour in 1990.

Nobel Prize

Sperry was granted numerous awards over his lifetime, including the California Scientist of the Year Award in 1972, the National Medal of Science in 1989, the Wolf Prize in Medicine in 1979, and the Albert Lasker Medical Research Award in 1979, and the Nobel Prize for Medicine/Physiology in 1981 that he shared with David H. Hubel and Torsten N. Wiesel.

Sperry won this award for his work with “split-brain” patients. The brain is divided into two hemispheres, the left and right hemispheres, connected in the middle by a part of the brain called the corpus callosum. In “split-brain” patients, the corpus callosum has been severed due to the patients suffering from epilepsy, a disease that causes intense and persistent seizures. Seizures begin in one hemisphere and continue into the other hemisphere. Cutting the corpus callosum prevents the seizures from moving from one hemisphere to the other, which then prevents seizures from occurring, thus allowing the patients to function normally instead of suffering from continuous seizures.