Many people feel no mood difference when wearing the goggles, Dr. Schiffer said. This may be because both their hemispheres have similar outlooks, being equally calm or equally troubled. Dr. Schiffer uses the goggles in therapy sessions to help patients recognize their two minds and to help the mature side take control over the immature side. Patients wearing goggles can actually converse with the opposite hemisphere, he said, and through talk therapy work toward recovery. The goggles do not support the idea that the right brain is poetic and the left is logical, Dr. Schiffer said.
People are very different.
So I thought there should be a switch. Dr. Pettigrew said there was plenty of evidence that different parts of each hemisphere cycle back and forth, left and right, during everyday tasks. Parts of the visual cortex switch dominance every few seconds, he said, whereas parts of the frontal lobes cycle every couple hours. To measure how fast the two sides switch dominance in a visual task, Dr. Pettigrew used a standard apparatus that measures so-called binocular rivalry. When a target of horizontal lines is shown to the right eye and vertical lines are shown to the left eye, and the targets are flashed, the brain does not fuse the lines into a hatched pattern.