Reference

Functional split brain in a driving/listening paradigm

Sasai et al. (2016). Functional split brain in a driving/listening paradigm. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1613200113

Abstract

Significance When one drives on an easy route and listens to a radio, it is at times as if one’s brain splits into two separate entities: one that drives and one that listens. When, instead, one drives while listening to a global positioning system, there is only one functional stream. Here, using measures of information integration, we show that a brain may functionally split into two separate “driving” and “listening” systems when the listening task is unrelated to concurrent driving, but not when the two systems are related. This finding raises the possibility that under certain conditions of daily life, a single brain may support two independent functional streams, a “functional split brain” similar to what is observed in patients with an anatomical split.