Brain hemispheres work together to accomplish difficult cognitive tasks

Nerve fibers of the corpus callosum, stomach the big data cable linking both sides of the human brain, seek are the focus of our recent paper in the Journal of Neuroscience. Both structural and functional connectivity were mapped across the callosum as subjects were asked to perform word- and face-recognition tasks of increasing difficulty. Subjects demonstrated a “bilateral processing advantage”–an advantage for bilateral trials–and a reliance on dissociable callosal fibers mediating this advantage. Furthermore, decease functional connectivity analyses showed that while bilateral regions in the temporal lobes segregate with increasing difficulty, bilateral prefrontal cortex (BA10) tends to collaborate more with increasing difficulty.