Friday, January 31, 2014

Seeing the persona in the left eye

The quote below comes from a previous post  It contains a link that no longer seems to work but I am only interested in a small part mentioned. How could language still develop normally in children with a left hemisphere lesion.  What would prompt the switch?

I am still amazed at the discrepancy that I see in the halves of someone's head.  I literally do not see the left half of their head as the persona that communicates to me. My normal is to focus solely on the right side of their head as I talk.  It was something I barely noted five so years ago. In fact I noticed it before I noticed I do not perceive the left side of my tongue independently of the right side of my tongue. My previous impression was that I saw both sides of someone's head when I communicated.  That does not seem to be the case. As I try to switch my attention to my left eye and make that connection to someone's left eye it is now easier to see/imagine the persona existing in the left side of their head as communicating to me.

I feel a very strong connection between the use of my left eye and the use of my left tongue. I do not know of any structural anatomical connection. If I speculate (more than my usual)  the connection would seem to be more neurological and or habitual learned behavior.

While left hemisphericasymmetries related to language are present at birth, further research has demonstrated that language may still develop normally in children who sustain a unilateral lesion in the left hemisphere (Dean &Anderson, 1997). Neuroimaging studies have postulated two sides to the development or presence of functional lateralization such that language is either bilaterally organized at birth and becomes specializedto the left hemisphere or language is localized to the left hemisphere at birth (Balsamo et al., 2002; Booth et al., 2001)."

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