THE OTHER SIDE OF THE BRAIN The Politics of Split-Brain Research in the 1970s–1980s Michael E. Staub Baruch College, City University of New York In the course of the 1970s and 1980s, theories derived from neuropsychological research on the bisected brain came rapidly to achieve the status of common sense in the United States and Canada, inflecting all manner of popular and academic discus- sion. These theories often posited that the right hemisphere was the seat of creative expression, whereas the left hemisphere housed rationality and language. This article analyzes the political and cultural implications of theories about the split brain. Gender relations, educational reform, management theory, race relations, and countercultural concepts about self-expression all quickly came to be viewed through the lens of left-brain/right-brain neuropsychological research. Yet these theories were often con- tradictory. On the one hand, some psychophysiological experiments premised that the brain was inherently plastic in nature, and thus self-improvement techniques (like mindfulness meditation) could be practiced to unfurl the right hemisphere’s intuitive potentialities. On the other hand, other psychophysiological experiments concluded that Native Americans as well as African Americans and persons from “the East” appeared inherently to possess more highly developed right-brain talents, and therefore suffered in the context of a left-hemisphere-dominated Western society. In both instances, psychologists put neuroscientific research to political and social use. This article thus connects a story from the annals of the neurosciences to the history of psychological experimentation. It analyzes the critical impact that speculative ideas about the split brain were to have not only on the post-1960s history of psychology but also on what soon emerged after the 1990s as the social neuroscience revolution. Keywords: neurosciences, race relations, education reform, self-help and popular psychology, counterculture In the course of the 1970s and 1980s, a sin- gular development within the neurosciences swept unexpectedly both into the rarified world of academia and into the popular mainstream. This was the split-brain craze, sometimes known as “dichotomania,” and it extrapolated from research findings regarding a single neu- roanatomical fact about the mammalian brain— namely, that it is divided into a right and a left hemisphere— only then to make an incredible range of claims about what the two hemispheres could (or could not) do. 1 It became customary in the course of these decades to voice a desire to access one’s own right-brain intuitive talents or to state openly that one’s rational left brain was simply too dominant and needed to be mellowed. Influential psychologists as well as many leading public intellectuals in a variety of disciplines across the humanities and hard sci- ences contributed to these remarkable develop- ments, as did well-regarded general interest magazines and journals like Scientific American and the New York Times Magazine. In 1976, for instance, iconoclastic manage- ment guru Henry Mintzberg effused (in the pages of the Harvard Business Review) that split-brain research had “great implications for both the science and art of management.” He declared that management theorists too fre- quently neglected the creative capacities of “well developed right-hemispheric processes,” 1 Neuropsychologist Marcel Kinsbourne is credited with coining the term “dichotomania” to denote split-brain the- orizing “in its excesses” (as cited in Galin, 1979, p. 23). This article was published Online First May 23, 2016. Correspondence concerning this article should be ad- dressed to Michael E. Staub, Department of English, Baruch College, City University of New York, 55 Lexington Ave- nue, New York, NY 10010. E-mail: Michael.staub@baruch .cuny.edu This document is copyrighted by the American Psychological Association or one of its allied publishers. This article is intended solely for the personal use of the individual user and is not to be disseminated broadly. History of Psychology © 2016 American Psychological Association 2016, Vol. 19, No. 4, 259 –273 1093-4510/16/$12.00 http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/hop0000035 259