CONCEPT
The Novelty-Routinization Gradient
Goldberg's reframing of hemispheric specialization: the two hemispheres are not divided by content (verbal versus spatial) but by novelty — the right hemisphere handles what is new, the left deploys what has become routine.
The gradient theory replaces the popular left-brain/right-brain distinction with a continuum running from full novelty to full routinization. When a brain encounters a genuinely new problem — one for which no existing template applies — the right hemisphere and the prefrontal cortex engage heavily in effortful, metabolically expensive processing. As the same problem type is encountered repeatedly, the processing migrates: toward the left hemisphere for its template-based recognition function, toward posterior regions for efficient automatic handling, away from the expensive prefrontal engagement that novel problems demand. The migration is learning. It is the neurological mechanism through which effortful novel processing converts, over hundreds of encounters, into automatic expert recognition.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The gradient theory emerged from Goldberg's observations of dissociations between patients with left and right hemisphere damage that the content-based theory of lateralization could not explain. Right-hemisphere patients showed impairments on novel tasks regardless of whether those tasks were verbal or spatial.