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When you split the brain, do you split the person?
- Aardwolf 9y ago> The brain is perhaps the most complex machine in the Universe Do you really know what's there in the entire universe?
- d33 9y agoProbably not, hence perhaps.
- jnty 9y agoNo, hence "perhaps". The meaning and intent of the sentence is entirely clear so I don't really see what good this sort of pedantry does.
- anoother 9y ago'perhaps'
- santoshalper 9y agoWeasel words allowed them to escalate to "Universe".
- vortico 9y agoYeah, I just checked. It's definitely the most complex. Well, other than the thing in Nebula VOQ 34E, but that's a given.
- lostmsu 9y agoKnown
- Cthulhu_ 9y agoWhat do we know of the world and the universe about us? Our means of receiving impressions are absurdly few, and our notions of surrounding objects infinitely narrow. We see things only as we are constructed to see them, and can gain no idea of their absolute nature. With five feeble senses we pretend to comprehend the boundlessly complex cosmos, yet other beings with wider, stronger, or different range of senses might not only see very differently the things we see, but might see and study whole worlds of matter, energy, and life which lie close at hand yet can never be detected with the senses we have.
- amelius 9y agoConversely, when you combine two brains, do you "merge" the people?
- vinchuco 9y agoone day https://git-scm.com/docs/ https://git-scm.com/docs/
- haikuginger 9y agoSquashing not recommended.
- anonymfus 9y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Krista_and_Tatiana_Hogan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Krista_and_Tatiana_Hogan
- emiliobumachar 9y agoWow. "There is evidence that the twins can see through each other's eyes due to brain conjoining."
- have_faith 9y ago> But without the corpus callosum the hemispheres have virtually no means of exchanging information They can communicate physically though. Each half of the brain can access the eyes and control various parts of the body, they could make the body do things that they could see/hear in order to act as a basic messaging channel. The conscious part of the brain could be completely oblivious to these subtle physical channels.
- d33 9y agoNot sure what would be the evolutionary purpose of that. I doubt that many of our ancestors survived brain split and managed to reproduce in order to pass the genes, so having that feature would probably mean it's necessary for something else... sounds like a long shot for me though.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 9y agoI think what is being suggested is not that it is a special function that only occurs in the case of the corpus callosum being split, but that these other communication channels are always operating regardless and the corpus callosum is specialized channel for certain kinds of information. Speculating based on the article, one would suspect that it allows for fast integration of visual information, but that other integrations rely on other, probably slower, channels.
- bencollier49 9y agoThe Corpus Callosum isn't the only interhemispheric commissure though, there are several more. The anterior and posterior commissures, as well as the Fornix etc.
- mfoy_ 9y agoIt's also well known that when one part of the brain dies, other parts will step up to assume its responsibilities. So it's not inconceivable that there is some flexibility there.
- cma 9y ago
- lucozade 9y ago> the current understanding seems to only deepen the mystery of consciousness Not sure I understand that. What they appear to have established is that, if you sever the direct connection between the two brain halves, functions that required the direct communication between the two halves is impaired. I mean, it's interesting to note what those functions are and the severity of the impairment. But there doesn't appear to be any effect on consciousness at all; at least not in the article's description of the effects. Am I missing something?
- mfoy_ 9y agoI think that's the point. The previous work referenced in the article seemed to indicate something much MUCH more profound.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 9y ago>How does a brain, consisting of many modules, create just one person? The same way a population, consisting of many people, creates just one state? The state is not the people and the people are not the state, yet both exist.
- mfoy_ 9y agoI am not my neurons, my neurons are not me, but my identity is driven by those neurons. Exactly... a non-mystery. But a great example of "the whole being greater than the sum of its parts".
- booleandilemma 9y agoI think Daniel Dennett said it best: Not a single one of the cells that compose you knows who you are, or cares.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- liberte82 9y agoBut a state isn't conscious
- dpark 9y agoSure it is. A State reacts to its environment, acts in its interest, engages in rational decision making (at times), and generally exhibits self-aware behavior.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 9y agoBy what metric do you make that declaration? I submit that any empirical model of consciousness applies equally to states as it does to human minds.
- 9y ago
- kaffeemitsahne 9y agoYet another bullshit article from aeon.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- bmn__ 9y agoVideo illustration of the previous experiments mentioned in the article: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wfYbgdo8e-8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wfYbgdo8e-8
- rqs 9y ago> The brain is perhaps the most complex machine in the Universe. That's when I found how useful a 'perhaps' can be. LOL.
- jpfed 9y agoHere's a thought experiment. Say you had more than one RNN trained for the same task (say, generating text). How would you couple them? You could just, character by character, have each RNN generate its output on its own, and then take a majority vote or do some weighted average to combine the output, but otherwise let each RNN operate independently. But wouldn't it be strange for those RNNs whose output was not ultimately selected to continue processing along the same lines, uncorrected by what was actually selected? Another possibility is to include a "ultimately selected" input to each RNN so they can be privy to the group's decisions. Yes, your internal state said that "e" should be selected, but the group selected "r"- what will you do now? Yet another possibility would be to perform "retroactive justification". Let us say that one RNN (with an internal state S) selected "e", but the group selected "r". Under retroactive justification, the state used for the next character is a state (maybe the one closest to S) that would have instead produced "r" as output. Split brains are coupled by their shared access to the body and act within the same environment. How do the hemispheres use that coupling?
- otakucode 9y agoUnlike the metaphor you suggest, in the body decisions are not made by vote. Each half the brain controls particular pieces, with the other not participating. A closer metaphor would be separate RNN which each determine one bit of the response, with the response being observed by each.
- rwmj 9y agoIs he saying that the papers/experiments of Sperry (for which he won the Nobel Prize) were not reproducible? They only tested two new patients. How rare are split-brain patients? (I assume very rare indeed if they could only find two subjects).
- Roverlord 9y agoI imagine the neurosurgeons doing it to reduce epilepsy also want to preserve as much connectivity as possible, so total severance of the tissue between the hemispheres may be rarer in present population of splitbrain patients as their technique improved?
- johndoe489 9y agoFascinating subject. Much more is address in Iain Mc Gilchrist's book "The Master and his Emissary : the divided brain and the making of the western world" http://iainmcgilchrist.com/ http://iainmcgilchrist.com/ ps: put short, the book explains how pop psychology belief that left is maths and right is arts (you get the idea), was wrong, and yet.. there is a physiologically noticable difference as well as observable differences in how each hemispheres processes reality. In short, each hemisphere attends to the world with a different kind of attention, left is narrow and focused for what we commonly see as intellectual acvitivites, left deals with a map of the world. Right hemispheres takes the world as one whole, it's broad attention required to survive in our environment, but it's also necessary for empathy, etc. The book then tries to show how the over relianceo n our left hemisphere in today's world has roots in the last few centuries, and that perhaps it is not in our best interest. BOTH hemispheres are always needed, but we are increasingly acting in the world from the left hemisphere (hence the book title "the master and his emissary").
- otakucode 9y agoDualism is wholly wrong. There is no mind-body split. Even speaking of 'the brain' is just a rough convenience. Individual neurons stretch from that tangled mass of them up in your skull all the way down your spine and to the soles of your feet. Every nerve fiber extends from nearly every point in your body right into your brain. Perception pours in from every point, and it is all extremely important. Emotion, for instance, primarily arises from biofeedback. Remove the feedback of feeling your 'expression' of emotion and you will cease to be capable of 'feeling' that emotion. Consciousness is not a 'thing', it is a property. Thus far we know of only one sort of system that can hold the property (human beings in our environment) although we do gain some information from observing humans of different configurations (such as seeing that people with total facial paralysis experience significant emotional dulling and substantial changes to their subjective personal experience over time) that hints at what things are important for different aspects. So far as we have evidence for, there is no reason to think that you might be able to, for instance, simulate solely a brain and have anything akin to consciousness. Just removing patterned sensory input from a typical person via sensory deprivation quickly results in their consciousness dissolving. So how a brain without a body and without an environment to perceive might ever have a hope of consciousness I've no idea.
- amelius 9y ago> Consciousness is not a 'thing', it is a property. But if consciousness is only a property that doesn't influence the actual physics, then how are we even able to talk about consciousness? Why would it occur to physical beings that something like consciousness exists?
- kazagistar 9y agoNot sure what that question means. An ocean wave is something that emerges from the basic laws of physics, but its not actually a "thing", its just a bunch of water exhibiting a property. The only difference between that and the human mind (and properties of it like consciousness) is the level of complexity and thus completeness of our ability to model it. The mind is a wave in an ocean of brain.
- peter303 9y agoThis is part of the philosophical problem of identity. Is there a non-physical part of the mind? If you duplicate a body by cloning, matter relicator, or exact uploading into a computer, do you have multiple persons or souls? (Star Trek explored several variations) Does [any part of] the mind survive death?
- SubiculumCode 9y agoThere is a video about a split brain patient (somewhere), while they are shopping. The left hand might put a box of cereal into the shopping cart, but the right hand puts it right back on the shelf. I wish I cod find the video.
- legohead 9y agoThe thing that has stuck with me is the career test that was given to someone with a split brain, and one side wanted to be a racecar driver and the other wanted to be something completely different. [1] [1] https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-superhuman-mind/201211/split-brains https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-superhuman-mind/201...
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- trollopTheJope 9y agothe corollary to this question is more interesting - when you split the person, do you split the brain? the answer is not necessarily. for example, you may split the person horizontally or even at a knee or elbow joint. it might surprise you to know that even if you split them on the head, it does not follow that the brain will be split. this ability of science to turn a question on its head and throw out insightful conclusions surprises me almost daily.