If you just learned that "Split Brain" was thing, I recommend watching this video by GPGrey, one of the best educational channels on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wfYbgdo8e-8
This is giving me the heebies and the jeebies.
Split Brain Does Not Lead to Split Consciousness
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Re: Split Brain Does Not Lead to Split Consciousness
#32This is an interesting experiment, and it may show that "split consciousness" is a mistake, but I don't think "unified consciousness" is the correct conclusion from that. I'd say instead that more likely this is just an edge case where the "consciousness" abstraction breaks down; it's an idea based on people who haven't had their corpus callosum severed, there's not necessarily any reason to expect that it continues to make sense in more general cases. Counting "How many conscious observers are there?" is probably just the wrong question.
Re: Split Brain Does Not Lead to Split Consciousness
#33A few years before he died, I heard Kim Peek speak at an event. He was a savant who retained 98% of everything he read. He would memorize phone books simply by reading them once. When he read, his left eye would read the left page while his right eye would read the right page at the same time. He could tell anyone the sports scores listed in the newspaper on the day they were born. He was also severely socially impaired and couldn't carry on a conversation.
His father described his condition as being due to having his left and right hemisphere fused together where as most people's are separate with communication channels between them.
Re: Split Brain Does Not Lead to Split Consciousness
#34This seems weird. Assuming each hemisphere only receives information from one half of the field of view and only controls one half of the body and both halves are truly separated, than there is no [obvious] way both halves can act in a synchronized manner. At least one of the three assumption has to be false.
Re: Split Brain Does Not Lead to Split Consciousness
#35Last year I watched Dr. Gazzaniga's 2009 Scotland lecture series on Youtube. I noticed an inconsistency that bothered me enough to email him, but never got a reply. In his third Edinburgh video lecture[1], he shows two videos featuring patient J.W. In the second video, the test flashes RED and BANANA to his left and right hemispheres, respectively, and J.W. is asked to draw what he sees. He then proceeds to pick up t…
Even the earliest teats showed there was still some communication between the two halves,the tactile test from the original paper showed that the subject could not describe an object that only the left hand could feel, but they could point it out.
Right, in callosotomy patients there's some level of information exchange via secondary pathways. In particular, one of Gazzaniga's experiments showed transfer of emotions.
Re: Split Brain Does Not Lead to Split Consciousness
#36Note though that this is n=2, and I'd assume the two subjects were not sampled even remotely randomly from the set of split-brain patients...
Re: Split Brain Does Not Lead to Split Consciousness
#37This seems weird. Assuming each hemisphere only receives information from one half of the field of view and only controls one half of the body and both halves are truly separated, than there is no [obvious] way both halves can act in a synchronized manner. At least one of the three assumption has to be false.
and both halves are truly separated
They aren't, they are just mostly separated
Re: Split Brain Does Not Lead to Split Consciousness
#38A few years before he died, I heard Kim Peek speak at an event. He was a savant who retained 98% of everything he read. He would memorize phone books simply by reading them once. When he read, his left eye would read the left page while his right eye would read the right page at the same time. He could tell anyone the sports scores listed in the newspaper on the day they were born. He was also severely socially impai…
My problem with that sort of demonstration of amazing memory powers is that I have no way to check the sports scores on the day I was born as quickly as the person who says they're retrieving them from memory does so.
Even if I could just google them (there might be some online sports results archive or something- it would still not mean much unless I could find an identical copy of the exact listing the mnemonist memorised- like, a archived copy of the same newspaper they read on my birthday.
So, I don't know- is this really a thing that happens even under at least semi-rigorous testing? Or is it more like a parlour trick that's only good for entertainment value?
Re: Split Brain Does Not Lead to Split Consciousness
#39Does every animal/insect have two brain hemispheres? For example, what about a spider, or an octopus?
Re: Split Brain Does Not Lead to Split Consciousness
#40A few years before he died, I heard Kim Peek speak at an event. He was a savant who retained 98% of everything he read. He would memorize phone books simply by reading them once. When he read, his left eye would read the left page while his right eye would read the right page at the same time. He could tell anyone the sports scores listed in the newspaper on the day they were born. He was also severely socially impai…
My problem with that sort of demonstration of amazing memory powers is that I have no way to check the sports scores on the day I was born as quickly as the person who says they're retrieving them from memory does so. Even if I could just google them (there might be some online sports results archive or something- it would still not mean much unless I could find an identical copy of the exact listing the mnemonist me…
What do you mean? You can't check the sports result he recalls on the Internet? What do you mean it has to be the same newspaper he read? I'm confused.