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One Head, Two Brains: The origins of split-brain research (2015)
- drupe 2y agoIf one is interested in hemisphere theory, including psychological and philosophical implications, make sure to check out the work of Ian McGilchrist: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3V3_Y_FuMYk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3V3_Y_FuMYk
- GonzoBytes 2y agoAll of this is way above my paygrade, however.. There exists this work by Julian Jaynes called The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind: https://ia802907.us.archive.org/32/items/The_Origin_Of_Consciousness_In_The_Breakdown_Of_The_Bicameral_Mind_Julian_Jaynes_1976.pdf/The%20Origin%20of%20Consciousness%20in%20the%20Breakdown%20of%20the%20Bicameral%20Mind_%20Julian%20Jaynes_%201976.pdf https://ia802907.us.archive.org/32/items/The_Origin_Of_Consc... Seems pertinent, and now I will try to read it again. Perhaps it will be useful for reference by others.
- titaniumtown 2y agoIts a very interesting theory, either he's a genius or the theory is completely insane. I cannot decide which one.
- rep_lodsb 2y ago>Miller’s study uses a test called the “trait-judgment task”: A trait like happy or sad flashes on a screen, and research subjects indicate whether the trait describes them. Miller has slightly modified this task for his split-brain patients—in his experiments, he flashes the trait on a screen straight in front of the subject’s gaze, so that both the left and right hemispheres process the information. Then, he quickly flashes the words “me” and “not me” to one side of the subject’s gaze—so that they’re processed only by one hemisphere—and the subject is instructed to point at the trait on the screen when Miller flashes the appropriate descriptor. Seems to me (not a neuroscientist) like there's a flaw in that experiment: how would the right hemisphere understand the meaning of the words, if language is only processed by the left? I also recall reading that the more "primitive" parts of our brains don't have a concept of negation. But maybe they have been considering this and it's no issue?
- LoganDark 2y agoi haven't had any split brain operation done or anything but my personal experience as someone with dissociative identity disorder is that i can usually tell which parts are more left or right brained based on how they react to everyday events for our particular brain , the logical ones usually have immediate reactions that suck (like borderline personality disorder) and the emotional ones tend to have mish mash wordses feelings (idk how to write that it's like words-es, the s at the end is very gender for emotional feelings words so all of them tend to have it)
- GMoromisato 2y agoI always thought it was interesting that the human brain grew relatively quickly in evolutionary history. 3 million years ago, our ancestors had a 400 cc brain. 2.5 million years later, it was 1,400 ccs--more than 3 times larger. That implies to me that a larger brain immediately benefited our ancestors. That is, going from 400 to 410 ccs had evolutionary advantage and so did 410 to 420, etc. That implies that once the brain architecture was set, you could increase intelligence through scale. I bet there are some parallels to current AI there.
- marshmellman 2y agoThis comment reminded me of "A Thousand Brains: A New Theory of Intelligence" by Jeff Hawkins, which explores this. To Hawkins, the brain's relatively fast evolution implies there's a general-purpose "compute" unit that, once it evolved once, could proliferate without novel evolutionary design. He claims this unit is the brain's cortical column, and provides a lot of interesting evidence and claims that I no longer remember :)
- neonate 2y agohttps://web.archive.org/web/20241228215151/https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2015/07/split-brain-research-sperry-gazzaniga/399290/ https://web.archive.org/web/20241228215151/https://www.theat... https://archive.ph/gJ32A https://archive.ph/gJ32A
- zonkerdonker 2y agoThe confabulation to justify picking out related images that the left brain never observed (chicken and snow shovel in the article) reminds me profoundly of the confident slop produced by LLMs. Make you wonder if llms might be one half of the "brain" of a true AGI
- HeatrayEnjoyer 2y agoMore then half! Human experience is more confabulation than not. The optic nerve's digital-equivalent bandwidth is an estimated 10Mbps, predominantly dedicated to a narrow radius around the center of vision. Everything around the outside of your vision is a few fuzzy pixels that are in-filled with plausible data. Same goes for the blind spot created by the optic disc, which is actually fully fabricated as it has no cones or rods at all!
- BriggyDwiggs42 2y agoYou’d like blindsight, if you haven’t read it
- jjtheblunt 2y agoalong those lines, maybe dreaming is piecing together new adventures imagined from snippets of reality.
- encipriano 2y agoThose videos about ai making up a game after having watched countless hours of streaming is fucked up. It looks completely how dreams do
- jmesmith 2y agoDo you have a link?
- triMichael 2y ago
- Hacker_Yogi 2y agoI disagree with Steven Pinker’s claim that consciousness arises from the brain. This perspective fails to establish that the brain produces consciousness, as it relies on the mistaken assumption that "mind" and "consciousness" are interchangeable. While brain activity may influence the mind, consciousness itself could be a more fundamental aspect of reality. Rather than generating consciousness, the brain might function like a radio, merely receiving and processing information from an all-pervasive field of consciousness. In this view, a split-brain condition would not create two separate consciousnesses but instead allow access to two distinct streams of an already-existing, universal consciousness.
- financetechbro 2y agoThe idea that the brain functions as a sort of radio capturing a consciousness field makes the most sense to me and also feel comforting in some way
- Timwi 2y agoHowever, “makes sense to me” and “feels comforting” has no bearing on whether it's true.
- financetechbro 2y agoGreat observation. Good thing I never claimed for it to be true. Just thought it was interesting that others have had the same idea(s) as me
- morkalork 2y agoThis is dualism, no.
- Barrin92 2y agoIt's not a dualism at all. What the OP is proposing is similar to Spinoza (probably the most hardcore monist to ever exist), where mind is a fundamental property of the universe (in fact, there's only one mind) and each individual person is a 'mode' of it. It's effectively akin to talking about mass. Despite the fact that mass is observable as a distinct phenomenon in any object, it's obviously not accurate to say that you "produce mass" or that it's "your mass" in some private, ontologically separated way, it just appears that way, by definition if we look at particular manifestations of it.
- teddyh 2y agoRelated: You Are Two by GCP Grey: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wfYbgdo8e-8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wfYbgdo8e-8>
- 0x1ceb00da 2y agoLooks like this was one of the inspirations behind severance.
- Telemakhos 2y agoIt's certainly an inspiration for the Zizian cult, a group of vegan computer programmers currently being investigated by US authorities for a string of murders across the US. [0, 1] > LaSota believed that humans have two minds, a left and right hemisphere, and each hemisphere can be good or evil, according to posts on her blog. Eventually, LaSota came to believe that only very few people — she among them — are double good. [1] [0] https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2025/02/19/zizian-cult-like-group-details/79108035007/ https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2025/02/19/zizian... [1] https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/german-math-genius-get-drawn-cult-accused-coast-coast-killings-rcna189309 https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/german-math-genius-get-...
- benabbott 2y agoCool, and terrifying. This makes me consider that there is some sort of consciousness in the non-lingual side of split-brain patients. Which also makes me consider: Is there some sort of consciousness in my own brain I'm not aware of? Sure, my brain does a lot I'm not conscious of—but is there a quiet, thinking awareness that exists in my skull, that I, the mind writing this, do not know of?
- nuancebydefault 2y agoThe fact that the explaining part of the brain fills in any blanks in a creative manner (you need the shovel to clean the chicken shed), reminds me to some replies of LLMs. I once provided an LLM the riddle of the goat, cabbage and wolf, and changed the rules a bit. I prompted that the wolf was allergic to goats (and hence would not eat them). Still the llm insisted on not leaving them together on the same river bank, because the wolf would otherwise sneeze and scare the goat away. My conclusion was that the llm solved the riddle using prior knowledge plus creativity, instead of clever reasoning.
- captainmuon 2y agoI believe LLMs are entirely analogous to the speech areas of the brain. They have a certain capacity of speaking automatically, reflexively, without involving (other) memory for example. That is how you are able to deliver quippy answers, that is where idioms "live". You can see this in people with certain kinds of brain damage, if they are unable to recall certain memories (or sometimes if you press somebody to recall memories that they don't have) they will construct elaborate stories on the spot. They won't even notice that they are making it up. This is called confabulation, and I think it is a much better term than hallucination for what LLMs do when they make up facts. I feel this analogy confirmed by the fact that chain of thought works so well. That is what (most?) people do when they actively "think" about a problem. They have a kind of inner monologue. Now, we have already reached the point that LLMs are much smarter than the language areas of humans - but not always smarter than the whole human. I think the next step towards AGI would be to add other "brain areas". A limbic system that remembers the current emotion and feeds it as an input into the other parts. We already have dedicated vision and audio AIs. Maybe we also need a system for logical reasoning.