The neuro-romantic in me wants to say that it will look even more like the flower than the flower itself does. It won’t just be blandly representational it will expound: it will have a brave stab at showing the flowerness of the flower. But if the right hemisphere is given the pen, the drawing will be exuberant, sympathetic and free. If the left hemisphere draws it, the drawing will be small, wizened and truncated – a literally reductionist effort. If a wholly unanaesthetized patient is asked to draw a flower, the result will be a fairly accurate, prosaic representation. While the effect lasts, the patient is a left or a right hemispherical person.
Before neurosurgery it is common to shut down one hemisphere at a time by the injection of an anaesthetic agent into the blood supply to one side. Our brains are divided into two hemispheres, and the hemispheres are anatomically and functionally highly unsymmetrical. In neurology, just as everywhere else in biology, form is related to function. If we want to understand that world, we have to study our brains.
The world that each of us occupies is, at least in part, a creature of our brain. Published by Yale University Press, 597 pp.
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