A brain of two halves: insights into interhemispheric organization provided by near-infrared spectroscopy

The discovery of functional lateralization and localization of the brain marked the beginning of a new era in neuroscience. While the past 150 years of research have provided a great deal of knowledge of hemispheric differences and functional relationships, the precise organization of functional laterality remains a topic of intense debate. Here I will shed light on the functional organization of the two hemispheres by reviewing some of the most recent functional near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) studies that have reported hemispheric differences in activation patterns. Most NIRS studies using visual stimuli, which revealed functional differentiation between the hemispheres, have reported unilateral activation, i.e., significant levels of activation in only one hemisphere. Auditory stimuli, including speech sounds, elicited bilateral activation, while the limited number of studies on young infants revealed primarily unilateral activation. The stimulus modality and the age of the participants therefore determine whether the resulting cortical activation is unilateral or bilateral. By combining a review of the existing literature with NIRS results regarding homologous connectivity across hemispheres, I hypothesized that the origin of functional lateralization changes from the independence of each hemispheric region, to mutual inhibition between homologous regions during development. Future studies applying multi-modal measurements along with NIRS and spatiotemporal analyses will further deepen our understanding of the interhemispheric organization of brain function.