split brain consciousness

**kidjordan** · 06-30-2011 06:38 PM

This is an excerpt about split brain patients:

The Split brain

"Recognizing that the disconnected RH is conscious provides additional evidence that language is not necessary for human consciousness. More important, using the split brain as a model for the normal mind, a normal individual's consciousness can then be viewed as the net result of an interaction among at least two distinct states of consciousness. The question then arises why the normal person with an intact brain experiences consciousness as unified rather than dual. Sperry reasoned that normal consciousness is a higher emergent entity that transcends the separate awareness in the connected left and right hemispheres, supersedes them in controlling thought and action, and integrates their activity. Alternatively, Bogen (1990) and many of us argue that normal consciousness is also dual, with partially separate parallel processing in the two hemispheres which sometimes does result in subjective feelings of conflict. Moreover, some normal subjects behave like split-brain patients"

So the question I ask you is:
Do you think that "normal" (unsplit) consciousness is split or whole?
How do you explain this?

**Alric** · 06-30-2011 07:26 PM

I think it is like seeing. You have two eyes, but when you look at stuff you see things as one image, not two images. Each half of your brain is doing its own thing but they over lap, and share information so they work as a set and so they appear to be one. I think they might be dual but they work so closely together, that for more practical reasons they are the same. Another example would be like your two arms and hands. They are separately control but usually you would just call parts of your body one thing, your body. You might be typing something, and both hands work together effortlessly, as if they are the same.

So basically I think they might be split but they work so closely together they are effectively the same thing.

**IndieAnthias** · 07-02-2011 02:14 AM

I have more questions than I have answers about this, thought I've wondered about this topic for a little over a year now. This is so interesting to me and makes me wish I had majored in psychology.

I'll read that article you linked in full when I get a chance. Until then, here's what I've found in the past:

this is an interesting article on the topic I found a while back:
http://www.julianjaynes.org/pdf/pucc...inds-wigan.pdf

also anything on Alien Hand syndrome is interesting. I had a good youtube link but I can't seem to find it...

I had a personal experience (involving drugs, lol) that has caused me to be aware of the separations of various aspects of my mind, and I have come to think of myself as a "duality". I'm too inexperienced to be able to say to what extent this is actually a result of the separation of the brain hemispheres. I know it's not as simple as that.

But since then I do talk to my emotional aspect directly from time to time, I call him by my middle name. It sounds schizo but it helps me to frame problems for when I'm feeling perturbed for some unknown and irrational reason.

Actually, what I'd be really, really interested to learn about is what happens to people who have had one brain hemisphere completely removed. This may be covered in your link. I've found lots of material on patients who have had the corpus colossum severed but nothing on complete hemisphere removal other than.. that it happens.