Split-brain patients: dreaming, lucid dreaming, consciousness

**Zoth** · 05-01-2013 01:00 AM

I'm trying so hard to find a proper paper regarding dreaming on split-brain patients. For those who don't know what this term refers to, it basically translate into subjects who had their corpus callosum cut and thus no longer possess communication between the 2 hemispheres. This is done to patients that are suffering from severe epilepsy in order to restrain the random electrical activity to one side of the brain.

Let's assume that lucidity is an increase of brain activity in certain areas, like the ones posted in here. The deal, there's no communication between the hemispheres in these kind of people, and many times there's contradictory actions or events regarding perception, cognition, intent, etc. I found this quote around the web:

Split-brain patients have also taught us about dreaming. Scientists had hypothesized that dreaming is a right hemisphere activity, but they found that split brain patients do report dreaming. They found, therefore, that the left hemisphere must have some access to dream material. What was most interesting was the actual content of the dreams of the split-brain patients. Klaus Hoppe, a psychoanalyst, analyzed the dreams of twelve patients. He found that the dreams were not like the dreams of most normal people. " The content of the dreams reflected reality, affect, and drives. even in the more elaborate dream, there was a remarkable lack of distortion of latent dream thoughts. The findings show that the left hemisphere alone is able to produce dreams...Patients after commisurotomy reveal a paucity of dreams, fantasies, and symbols. Their dreams lack the characteristics of dream work; their fantasies are unimaginative, utilitarian, and tied to reality; their symbolization is concretistic, discursive, and rigid." (Segalowitz)

Of course some parts of it seem a bit outdated (we don't seem to use only one hemisphere to dream afaik), but when we go further into lucidity, we got much more troubling questions.

- Can split-bain patients even become lucid in the same way we do? Even if they can indeed become aware that they are dreaming, this is only happening in one side of the brain. What about the other? If it's dreaming at the same time, can we effectively talk about 2 dreams and 2 "realities" of lucidity?
- How can they act in their lucid dreams? We know that in dreams there's not really that connection with the actual brain part that was commanded to perform the action, but the brain itself acts like there was, which is why dreaming can indeed improve athletic performance. The deal is how would the other part of brain react when the subject was attempting to do something?
- Assuming each hemisphere is more specialized in some aspects of the human psyche, what would be the limitations in their "lucidity" moments?

I don't doubt that majority of people will be as clueless as me in the replies, but what do you think? How do you picture a lucid dream in a brain-split patient?