“There were cases when a split-brain patient would be reading a newspaper, and, since it’s only the left brain that processes language, the right brain gets bored as hell, and since the right brain controls the left arm the person would find that his left hand would suddenly grab the newspaper and throw it to the ground!” Paul says. “Well, it wasn’t quite like that. It wasn’t like he was surprised. It just kind of happened.” Some of the experiments sounded uncannily like cases of spiritual possession. One patient had a pipe placed in his left hand that he could feel but not see; then he was asked to write with his left hand what it was that he had felt. His left hand began very slowly to form the letters “P” and “I”; but then, as though taken over by a ghost, the hand suddenly began writing quickly and fluently, crossed out the “I” and completed the word “PENCIL.” Then, as though the ghost had been pushed aside again, the hand crossed out “PENCIL” and drew a picture of a pipe. It seemed, the experimenters concluded, that the left hemisphere, impatient with the left hand’s slow writing, had seized control of the hand and had produced the word “PENCIL” as a guess, based on the letter “P,” but then the right hemisphere had taken over once again and corrected it. There appeared to be two distinct consciousnesses inside a person’s head that somehow became one when the brain was properly joined. Or one self torn in two. newyorker/magazine/2007/02/12/two-heads?mbid=social_facebook
Posted on: Wed, 24 Dec 2014 09:22:52 +0000
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