It's suggested to them, that there is almost, essentially two consciousnesses
now, inside this one skull. By splitting the brain in half, it seems
as though the mind has been split. And that there are now two entities
within the same brain, extremely fascinating, and it got even kind of more
fascinating as they tried to mine this more.
At some point they came up with the, with the following study.
I hope nobody's offended by a picture of a relatively attractive woman with
relatively few clothes on, cause here we go.
They would present something like this to the patient very quickly.
present this image but they would present it so that only the right hemisphere
would see the image not the speech not the left hemisphere.
and so what would typically happen is the patient would blush, okay?
It's kind of uncomfortable to see an image like this while you're sitting in
a, in a testing room with a bunch of you know, people in lab coats around you.
and so the person would blush, but here's the interesting thing.
When the, when the doctors said why are you blushing, the person wouldn't just
say I don't know. They would say, and that's, let's be
clear about this, when they're speaking, it's the left hemisphere speaking and the
left hemisphere did not see the picture. But they would say things like the
following, oh, I just thought of a bit of an off-color joke, I just remembered this
off-color joke. And it kind of embarrassed me to remember
it in this situation. And they would say, well, tell us, what
was this joke? And the person would typically say
something like, oh I can't, I can't remember right now and I, I, I don't want
to tell it anyway but that's, but that's why I blushed.
Okay, now why is this interesting? It's interesting because the person
showed like what you'd expect the left hemisphere to say is I did not see
anything. But instead it looked like the left
hemisphere, the one with speech, convinced itself of a new reality that
explained it's behavior. It's like the left hemisphere noticed the
blushing, felt the blushing, could, could from previous associations, could
identify in a vague sense, where that blushing came from.
That blushing came from some sexually inappropriate thought occurring in this
context. So it's like the left hemisphere could
get there and then it built a story around that.
It, it created this story that was consistent with its behavior.
And this started a whole notion that, that's still alive and well in psychology
and debated pretty rigorously about the role of consciousness.
There are some figures in psychology who believe that this is really what
consciousness does. That our behavior in the real world, is
in fact influenced primarily by stimuli around us.
and so the stimuli just invokes certain behaviors in us.
And then we essentially watch ourselves, and tell ourselves stories that explain
why we behave that way. So the consciousness is in a sense
interpreting our behavior, coming up with a theory and then we own it.
Once we come up with a theory we believe that theory to be true.
And this kind of notion of consciousness coming after the fact you know really
flies in the face of the notion of us consciously deciding to do things.
So it's really fascinating and these split brain studies really fueled that
whole notion. I mean it's really, to really get a sense
of the split brain phenomenon, you really need to see somebody.
So I've got a video here of Joe the Split Brain Patient where you can actually see
a, a split brain patient behaving in some of the ways I've told you about.
So really check that out because that, that will make it I think it will make
the magic? Is it magic?
I don't know if magic is the right word. But the, but the oddness of it really
stand out. This is a video of Michael Gazzaniga
himself, so you can get a sense of the personality and he will talk about the
split brain studies a little bit. So, hear a little bit from somebody who
was right there. and now we have a couple of readings.
So one is a nature article all about Split Brain Study, A Tale of Two Halves
and another one is an article on Psychology today.
so written in different levels, but again, all about the same phenomenon and
the impact it has had on our understanding of the brain.
The connections between the hemispheres and how this all relates to human
consciousness. Very cool stuff, and I think it'd really
make you have a, have a deep and intense appreciation of those three pounds of
tissue in our, in our skull. All right, cool.
So that wraps up week two. we're going to have a, a little bit of a
activity after this week, so, so check out for that for the announcements.
and then we're going to continue on our way through a bunch of fascinating
psychology experiments, and I, I look forward to doing that with you.
Have a great time. I'll see you next week.
Bye bye. [BLANK_AUDIO]
