Roger Wolcott Sperry was known as a shy and somewhat retiring man, who preferred camping with his wife and children; perhaps he needed the quiet time to balance his affinity for challenging prevailing wisdom.

Sperry, who was born on Aug. 20, 1913, in Hartford, Conn., was awarded the 1981 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his work on understanding the hemispheres of the human brain, sometimes called split-brain research.

His father died when he was 11, and his mother went back to work as an assistant to the principal of a Hartford high school. Sperry got a scholarship to Oberlin College in Ohio, where his majored in English and was captain of the basketball team. He was an exceptional athlete; in high school, he set the state record for javelin, and in college, he also played football, baseball and track.

His notes from his introduction to psychology class foreshadowed his career, “Where does behavior come from? What is the purpose of consciousness?”

He got his English degree in 1935, but stayed at Oberlin to get a masters degree in psychology. In 1941, he completed his doctoral work in zoology at the University of Chicago, where Paul A. Weiss was his advisor.

His first research paper, written in 1939, reflected the paths his research would take: “The objective psychologist, hoping to get at the physiological side of behavior, is apt to plunge immediately into neurology trying to correlate brain activity with modes of experience… The result in many cases only accentuates the gap between the total experience as studied by the psychologist and neural activity as analyzed by the neurologist."

His research with rats challenged the current understanding of the brain, showing that the rats’ motor-nerve system was “hard-wired” and would not be modified with training stimulus. The work refuted some of his advisors theories: “resonance principle” and “impulse specificity theory.”

He was accepted for post-doctoral work with the eminent psychologist Karl Lashley at Harvard University and at the Yerkes Laboratory of Primate Biology. Lashley’s research was on how memory was not localized to a specific part of the brain, that the brain had the ability adapt.

Sperry worked with Lashley from 1941-1946, and his research involved surgery on salamanders. He cut their optic nerves and turned their eyes upside down to see what would happen when the nerve regenerated. The salamanders reacted as if the world was upside down and backwards and no retraining could reverse the brain’s reaction. The research led to Sperry’s chemo-affinity theory.

In his article for the National Academy of Sciences, Theodore Voneida, wrote, “These experiments laid the foundation for many of our present-day views about neuronal specificity in brain development.”

During World War II, he took a two-year leave from working with Lashley to join the army, where he was reunited with Weiss in researching peripheral nerve injury cases.

After the war, Sperry returned to the University of Chicago. He joined the National Institutes of Health in 1952, and then went to the California Institute of Technology in 1954.

In the 1950s his research focused on individuals whose severe epilepsy was treated by the surgical severing of the corpus callosum, which separated the hemispheres of the brain and eliminated seizures.

Tim Horder described the interesting contradiction the research offered Sperry: “The split-brain studies could be read in two seemingly contradictory ways: as evidence for lateralization (and therefore localization) or as evidence for the way in which the brain or its separate parts operate as a diffuse, integrated whole. Sperry seems to have convinced himself that he could satisfactorily combine the two.”

This research, and the conclusions it lead to about how the brain works, earned him a share of the Nobel Prize.

He died on April 17, 1994.