Tone of Voice and Mind : The Connections between Intonation ...

Preface
In 1986, I wrote a book with the audacious title of “The Brain Code,” which
summarized the findings from neuropsychology indicating a particular view of
hemispheric specialization. The basic argument was that the functions of the
human cerebral hemispheres are not simply different from one another, but
complementary – principally due to mutually inhibitory effects acting through
the corpus callosum. The topic of hemispheric specialization is just one part
of human psychology, but left and right hemisphere relations simply must
be addressed in any serious attempt to understand characteristically human
behaviors such as language and tool-usage.
I chose the phrase “brain code” because I was convinced that the phenomena
of the human mind needed to be described at the appropriate brain level –
not at the level of the gene or the neurotransmitter, and not in terms of social
psychology or politics. The lower-level “neuron code” and the higher-level “social
code” are both important topics, but in my view psychology should be primarily
about the functions of whole brains and individual behavior. Of course,
neuron physiology underlies all psychology, and beneath that level there are
relevant genetic and biochemical phenomena. Equally obvious is the fact that
any true insight into human psychology will have sociological and political
implications, and that sociopolitical phenomena provide much of the content
of our daily mental lives. Still, I maintain that the aim of psychology proper
should be the clarification of the mechanisms of thought at the level of the
whole-organism in a terminology that relates, first and foremost, to the behavior
of adult individuals – and in a terminology that has clear connections
to “common sense” psychology and the “folk wisdom” that we are all familiar
with and that still rumble through our minds and daily conversations.
My impression then and still today is that many discussions of ostensibly
psychological matters end up discussions about other issues – higher or lower
level topics that are perhaps of interest to anyone studying psychology, but issues
that should not and cannot replace our discussion of the brain and its
control over behavior. The declaration of a “brain code” was an attempt to
focus on the questions of brain mechanisms – principally, how thoughts and