Sperry and colleagues, including Michael Gazzaniga, conducted extensive experiments on an epileptic patient who had had his corpus collosum, the "bridge" between the left and right hemispheres of the brain, split so that the connection was severed. At first the patient seemed normal, but experimentation showed that certain activities, such as naming objects or putting blocks together in a prescribed way, could only be done when using one side of the brain or the other. (Since the right eye connects to the left brain, the left hand to the right brain, and so on throughout the body, the stimulus would be given to the side of the body opposite the brain hemisphere being tested.) These abilities were not absolute, but it seemed that the left hemisphere specializes in language processes and the right is dominant in visual-construction tasks. Sperry's work helped chart the brain and opened fields of new psychological and philosophical research.

In 1981 Sperry was awarded half of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine "for his discoveries concerning the functional specialization of the cerebral hemispheres." The other half was awarded to David H. Hubel and Torsten N. Wiesel "for their discoveries concerning information processing in the visual system."