When You Split the Brain, Do You Split the Person? (aeon.co)

An anonymous reader shares an article: The brain is perhaps the most complex machine in the Universe. It consists of two cerebral hemispheres, each with many different modules. Fortunately, all these separate parts are not autonomous agents. They are highly interconnected, all working in harmony to create one unique being: you. But what would happen if we destroyed this harmony? What if some modules start operating independently from the rest? Interestingly, this is not just a thought experiment; for some people, it is reality. In so-called 'split-brain' patients, the corpus callosum -- the highway for communication between the left and the right cerebral hemispheres -- is surgically severed to halt otherwise intractable epilepsy. [...] What, then, happens to the person? If the parts are no longer synchronised, does the brain still produce one person? The neuroscientists Roger Sperry and Michael Gazzaniga set out to investigate this issue in the 1960s and '70s, and found astonishing data suggesting that when you split the brain, you split the person as well. Sperry won the Nobel prize in medicine for his split-brain work in 1981. [...] Case closed? Not to me. [...] To try to get to the bottom of things, my team at the University of Amsterdam re-visited this fundamental issue by testing two split-brain patients, evaluating whether they could respond accurately to objects in the left visual field (perceived by the right brain) while also responding verbally or with the right hand (controlled by the left brain). Astonishingly, in these two patients, we found something completely different than Sperry and Gazzaniga before us. Both patients showed full awareness of presence and location of stimuli throughout the entire visual field -- right and left, both.

Comments

Some are born without a corpus callosum

[jenningsthecat]

I lived across the street from a young girl - I'll call her 'Sandra' - who had grown into her mid-to-late teens when I moved away. She had been born without a corpus callosum, and her parents were warned that she would never be anything approaching normal, and might not even live.

Apparently her parents did something right, or she herself possessed some kind of will or magic that got her beyond the difficulty. Other people who had kids born with the same lack would ask Sandra's parents for advice and support. Sandra was always a bit quirky, and when she was younger I always had the sense that she wasn't quite normal, even before I knew her history. But she was sweet and funny, she made pretty much normal progress in school, and she grew into a lovely young woman who didn't wasn't out of place among her peers in any significant way.

So I'm not surprised at these new findings. The human brain seems to be very good at routing around damage in ways that we don't yet understand.

They actually *are* autonomous agents

[karlandtanya]

FTH (and FTA):
"Fortunately, all these separate parts are not autonomous agents. They are highly interconnected, all working in harmony to create one unique being: you."

Almost none of that is true: You aren't unique. You aren't particularly highly interconnected. You aren't in self-harmony. You aren't a single "being". In fact, there are more bacterial cells in "you" human cells in "you"...and many peer-reviewed papers confirm that those bacteria do contribute to determining "your" behavior. And those autonomous agents inside of you? They are pretty darned autonomous.

My freshman psych professor explained it to us this way: "There are a whole lot of different behaviors we can observe. Different parts of the organism have different jobs. One of those jobs is to make up stories. We call that one consciousness. The illusion that each healthy uninjured human body has one integrated consciousness is a complete fantasy. Injuries and other pathologies expose this fact in interesting ways, but fragmented and incomplete consciousness is the normal way of being for all of us."

A good way to see the separation is to compare desire vs behavior. If there was one fully integrated and aware "consciousness", then desire and behavior would always be consistent. They're not. Not even close.
Consider things we do even though we'd prefer not to: Habits, compulsions, and addictions. Tobacco smoking could be any of those. It's not hard to find a smoker who will tell you "I want to stop smoking".
Or neurological phenomena, for example "the yips" (google it, it's a golf thing).
On a more positive note, consider practiced skills--like touch-typing, playing musical instruments, batting a baseball, rollerblading, etc. You can't consciously decide "I will skillfully perform this act" and *poof* it's done.
There's something in you that does (or does not) those things. But it's not the thing that's speaking to the person next to you.

Lovecraft put it quite nicely:
“The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far.”

You split one brain structure, not all neuro

[istartedi]

They split one brain structure, not the whole neurological system. I don't think they even split the whole brain, so it could be that lower level brain structures are picking up the slack. At the very least we know they didn't split the spine since that'd kill you. It's conceivable that these lower levels of the brain and peripheral nerves are an integral part of being a person. I've heard that the heart actually turns out to have more to do with personality than modern medicine once thought. It's not just a stupid pump. Users of artificial hearts report that it lacks that certain something. Receivers of transplanted organs sometimes acquire traits from the donor, such as food preferences. You wouldn't think such traits could be conferred via those organs. Your sense of self may be more "distributed" than some of us think.