NO VET BRAIN-BUILDING.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XXX, Issue 423, 13 August 1908, Page 2

NO VET BRAIN-BUILDING.

Thk wonderful effect upon the brain produced by systematic hard culture, more particularly in the matter of two-handed writing, is the subject of an interesting statement by Dr Manfred Fraenkel, of Berlin. At least per cent cf all people, Dr Fraenkel points out, are right-handed, and accordingly the location for the pictures of the recollection is the left brain, which, in consequence of the crossing of the nerves in the spfnal marrow, has to control the right hand. Dr Fraenkel proceeds: “As everything is subject to the left brain (the right-hand provider), all our thoughts, feelings, actions, writing and motions the right brain does mt influence at all. Examinations on patients whose right hand was paralysed by a fit of apoplexy, and who have to rely only on the right half of the brain, have proved that the persons, suddenly deprived of the use of the tongue and of all movements of the right side, are not capable of doing anything with the left hand, which is now without a guide. “During the course of my examinations I have found a possibility of helping these poor creatures to new signs of life, and that simply by exercising the left .hand. I have come to the conclusion that normal persons likewise will succeed in making the left hand equal to the right one by piactising the left hand by developing to higher perfection the right hemisphere of the brain. “We succeeded with a patient, paralysed on the right side, by dint of systematic writing witn the left hand. He regained his his power of speech, which he had lost. His linguistic capacity of the right side although existing, but not cultivated before, had been awakened to full activity. Another stroke affecting the right side, again deprived him of the slight flexibility of the right hand which he had just regained, but—as a proof of my principles being right—his speech remained.”