> has led me to adopt the working hypothesis that many of our cognitive experiences are more complicated than we tend to assume, and that they're often made up

> has led me to adopt the working hypothesis that many of our cognitive experiences are more complicated than we tend to assume, and that they're often made up of several more or less independent processes After finishing my CompSci degree I was bored and did some first year psychology degree courses and that was also one of my main takeaways (I don’t mean it was an original take, just one of the main takeaways I remember from these courses). See for example split brain individuals[0] where the connection between the two hemispheres is severed/damaged - up to a point this was a common surgery to treat epilepsy a decade ago. Patients seemed fine on first glance, but ultimately there were interesting incongruences [1]. I’m probably doing injustice to the description of the experiment so please read the linked page, but essentially they created a situation where each eye saw a different image (e.g. one related to chickens and another to snow) and then asked to choose with different hands from a set of pictures the picture most related (e.g. an egg or a snowman). The right hand (connected to the right hemisphere and thus the left eye) chose one thing connected to what the left eye saw and the right hand chose another. Let’s say the left eye saw snow and the right saw chickens. The most interesting part is when the patients were asked about their choices, since only the left hemisphere can talk (the speech center). So they explained why the left hand chose something correctly, but made up some unrelated explanation about their right hand choices (“eggs are white like snow”)! In other more horrific terms, the right hemisphere had some level of thinking/reasoning going on but could not speak since it now had no mouth. So, in healthy individuals there’s definitely syncing between the two hemispheres and different centers going on, but as any complex system I’m sure there are hiccups. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Split-brain https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Split-brain [1] https://physics.weber.edu/carroll/honors/split_brain.htm https://physics.weber.edu/carroll/honors/split_brain.htm