Christian Jarrett has posted an excellent collection of resources for students and teachers of A-Level psychology.
Christian's post includes links to PDFs of key papers in cognitive, developmental, biological and social psychology, including a classic 1968 paper from American Psychologist, called Hemisphere deconnection and unity in consciousness, in which the Nobel Prize-winning neurobiologist Roger W. Sperry reports his behavioural studies of split brain patients, and discusses their implications:
One of the more general and also more interesting and striking features of this syndrome may be summarized as an apparent doubling in most of the realms of conscious awareness. Instead of the normally unified single stream of consciousness, these patients behave in many ways as if they have two independent streams of conscious awareness, one in each hemisphere, each of which is cut off from and out of contact with the mental experiences of the other. In other words, each hemisphere seems to have its own separate and private sensations; its own perceptions; its own concepts; and its own impulses to act, with related volitional, cognitive, and learning experiences. Following the surgery, each hemisphere also thereafter its own separate chain of memories that are rendered inaccessible to the recall processes of the other.
