Speaker 1: Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name
Speaker 1: is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and it's Saturday.
Speaker 1: Time to go into the vault, this time with a
Speaker 1: follow up from last Saturday's Vault episode. This is going
Speaker 1: to be our episode on the Split Brain Experiments, Part two.
Speaker 1: If you listen last Saturday, you know what's in store.
Speaker 1: So I guess let's jump right in with every day.
Speaker 1: And from both sides of my intelligence, the moral and
Speaker 1: the intellectual, I've else drew steadily near to that truth,
Speaker 1: by whose partial discovery I have been doomed to such
Speaker 1: a dreadful shipwreck that man is not truly one, but
Speaker 1: truly too. Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from
Speaker 1: how Stuff Works dot Com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to
Speaker 1: Blow your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb and I'm
Speaker 1: Joe McCormick, and this is going to be part two
Speaker 1: of our two part exploration of hemisphereic collateralization and especially
Speaker 1: the split brain experiments of Roger Sperry and Michael Gazzaniga
Speaker 1: starting in the nineteen sixties. Now, if you haven't heard
Speaker 1: the last episode, you should really go check that out first.
Speaker 1: That's gonna lay all the groundwork for what we're talking
Speaker 1: about today, right, and it will also explain why we
Speaker 1: kicked off this episode and the last episode with the
Speaker 1: reading from Robert Louis Stevenson Strange Case of Dr Jacqueline mr.
Speaker 1: Hyde from six short version is Robert Louis Stevenson thought
Speaker 1: he had another dude in there. What did he call him?
Speaker 1: The other guy? The man inside me by I know
Speaker 1: it was a different author. Uh no, it was it
Speaker 1: was me and the that other fellow, that other fellow. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So in the last episode we discussed twentieth century research
Speaker 1: on a small group which it was a small subset
Speaker 1: of the total group of maybe fifty to a hundred
Speaker 1: or maybe a little more than a hundred people who
Speaker 1: have ever received a surgical intervention called a corpus callosotomy,
Speaker 1: which is a severing of the corpus colosum and the
Speaker 1: corpus colosum you can kind of think of as the
Speaker 1: high speed fiber optic cable that connects the two hemispheres
Speaker 1: of the brain together. Now, the surgery was originally intended
Speaker 1: as a kind of last resort treatment for people who
Speaker 1: had terrible epileptic seizures. There are so few of these
Speaker 1: patients because now we generally have better, safer ways of
Speaker 1: treating epilepsy without such a radical surgery, right though these
Speaker 1: individuals are still around. Yes, certainly, in the last episode
Speaker 1: we mentioned that Pinto study that looked at a couple
Speaker 1: of them in seen, And it's very possible that we
Speaker 1: have listeners out there who have received this surgery as well.
Speaker 1: And obviously we would love to hear from you if
Speaker 1: there's anything you would like to share. Oh yeah, please,
Speaker 1: if you have a split brain, email us immediately. And
Speaker 1: in fact you mentioned the more recent research. We're gonna
Speaker 1: look at some of that research in today's episode. But
Speaker 1: what neuroscientists learned in the twentieth century from this small
Speaker 1: group of patients was truly remarkable. Beginning in the nineteen
Speaker 1: sixties and continuing up until recent years, these split brain
Speaker 1: patients have been the subject of some of the most
Speaker 1: interesting research ever on the nature of the brain, the mind,
Speaker 1: and the self. So last time we talked about the
Speaker 1: original work of like Sperry and Gazzaniga, who discovered many
Speaker 1: fascinating things about how it's possible for one half of
Speaker 1: the brain to not know what the other half is thinking, doing,
Speaker 1: or seeing. This time we want to follow up on
Speaker 1: the subject, to explore some more recent studies and to
Speaker 1: ask questions about what these split brain studies mean for
Speaker 1: our lives. And to start off, I wanted to mention
Speaker 1: an anecdote I came across from the neuroscientist V. S.
Speaker 1: Ramachandren that he has brought up in some of his
Speaker 1: public talks and work. He tells a story of working
Speaker 1: with one particular split brain patient who had been trained
Speaker 1: to respond to questions with his right hemisphere. Now you'll
Speaker 1: remember from our last episode that in the case of
Speaker 1: most patients, the right hemisphere of the brain cannot speak.
Speaker 1: It might have some very rudimentary language comprehension, but generally
Speaker 1: language and especially the production of speech, is dominated by
Speaker 1: areas of the left hemisphere. So if you're dealing with
Speaker 1: the right hemisphere of a split brain patient and you
Speaker 1: show something only to their left visual field, which connects
Speaker 1: to the right hemisphere, and you ask them about it,
Speaker 1: what often happens is that, for instance, they will not
Speaker 1: be able to say the thing you have showed them
Speaker 1: in their right brain, or even explain it in words,
Speaker 1: but they will be able to draw the image with
Speaker 1: their left hand. Now. In the case of Ramaschandrian story,
Speaker 1: he had trained a patient in a lab at Caltech
Speaker 1: to answer questions posed directly to his right hemisphere only
Speaker 1: by pointing with his left hand to response boxes indicating yes, no,
Speaker 1: I don't know now. Of course, asking these questions directly
Speaker 1: to the left hemisphere is a lot easier because it
Speaker 1: just processes language normally and you can just ask. But
Speaker 1: he trained the right hemisphere to respond as well, so
Speaker 1: the patient was perfectly capable of answering questions like this
Speaker 1: with either hemisphere. Are you on the moon right now?
Speaker 1: Patient says no? Are you at cal Tech? Patient says yes.
Speaker 1: But Rama Schondre and then asked the right hemisphere do
Speaker 1: you believe in God? And it says yes. And he
Speaker 1: then asked the left hemisphere, the language dominant hemisphere, do
Speaker 1: you believe in God? And it says no. This is
Speaker 1: yet another one that immediately when I heard the story,
Speaker 1: the hair stand up on the back of my neck.
Speaker 1: I feel the I feel that the goose bumps of
Speaker 1: of counterintuition running through me. Yeah, because I feel like,
Speaker 1: for the for the most part, I feel like a
Speaker 1: lot of us want to feel like we have a
Speaker 1: definitive answer to that question, and Queen answers like that,
Speaker 1: Now I'm probably a little weirder and that I and
Speaker 1: I imagined a lot of our listeners are like this
Speaker 1: as well, where someone asks you a questions like this
Speaker 1: and you can be a lot more wishy washy and say, well,
Speaker 1: I don't know. It depends you know, yes and no.
Speaker 1: I feel like most of us, if not all of us,
Speaker 1: we can have We can have contry contrary ideas in
Speaker 1: our mind. We can have conflicting notions that are that
Speaker 1: are vying for dominance, which me, are you asking? Yeah?
Speaker 1: Askin Jacky? L are you asking hide? You know? Hid he?
Speaker 1: You know he's he's not much of a churchgoer, but
Speaker 1: but Jackal he's there every Sunday. Yeah, but he's only
Speaker 1: there to ultimately work his way up the chain and
Speaker 1: usurp the creator. Now Rama shonder and jokingly asks a
Speaker 1: theological question about this. He says, you know, assume the
Speaker 1: old dogma that people who have faith in God go
Speaker 1: to Heaven and people who don't go to hell? What
Speaker 1: happens when the split brain patient dies? That's a good
Speaker 1: laugh line. But I think this question is actually more
Speaker 1: profound than it seems at first, because we may not
Speaker 1: be divine judges casting people into heaven or hell, but
Speaker 1: we are judges, and we judge and evaluate and characterize
Speaker 1: people all the time every day, as if they are
Speaker 1: some sort of essential whole. We pick out what we
Speaker 1: believe to be the salient characteristics that define a per person,
Speaker 1: like this is their character and and now we know
Speaker 1: who they are. This is their mind, this is the person.
Speaker 1: There might be no way to get people to live
Speaker 1: and behave other than this. I mean, there might just
Speaker 1: be an inextricable part of our our personalities that we
Speaker 1: have to judge people as essential holes in this way.
Speaker 1: But I think this research should cause us to wonder
Speaker 1: about our folk beliefs about the nature of the mind
Speaker 1: and the brain and what it means to be a person. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, obviously, just to talk about judgment, we we
Speaker 1: have some severe problems with with with dealing with the
Speaker 1: idea that that that that there is not a single
Speaker 1: person over a length of time. I mean, I mean, obviously,
Speaker 1: you have people serving prison sentences for crimes that an
Speaker 1: earlier iteration of themselves committed. What do they say, I'm
Speaker 1: a different person now, and and it is true we
Speaker 1: have all different people than than we once were. But
Speaker 1: you might in some ways also be a different person
Speaker 1: than you were a couple of seconds ago, right, Or
Speaker 1: it can be kind of a juggling back and forth.
Speaker 1: You know, I'm a different person in the morning versus uh,
Speaker 1: the afternoon. I mean, I I truly feel that, well,
Speaker 1: I mean, when it comes to questions like this, like
Speaker 1: the theological question. The fact is, most people, I think,
Speaker 1: are probably filled with all kinds of doubts concerning whatever
Speaker 1: their beliefs about religion are, whether you believe in God
Speaker 1: or not. Either way, you probably sometimes wonder if you're
Speaker 1: wrong or you should. That's always a great exercise about
Speaker 1: anything in life, think about the possibility that you're wrong,
Speaker 1: no matter what it is exactly. But our everyday experience,
Speaker 1: of course, is that these varying states of doubt they
Speaker 1: get somehow synthesized. Right. You roll it all up together,
Speaker 1: you say, even though whichever way I am, whether I
Speaker 1: believe in God or not, I ultimately have one way
Speaker 1: of answering that question. Most people are like this when
Speaker 1: you I mean, you might not be this way, Robert,
Speaker 1: but a lot most people would say I have an answer. Well,
Speaker 1: at the end of the day, or even just minute
Speaker 1: to minute, you your brain has to tell a story
Speaker 1: about who you are, right and for that to make sense,
Speaker 1: there still has to be a sentence. There still has
Speaker 1: to be a story, some sort of continuation. And even
Speaker 1: if you know my story is a little more uh,
Speaker 1: you know, meandering, it's still a story, right, Yeah, Yeah,
Speaker 1: You're still narrativising yourself. You're composing a synthetic picture of
Speaker 1: who I am, and for you, I think that picture
Speaker 1: includes more ambiguity than a lot of people are comfortable with.
Speaker 1: But either way, no matter what, you're telling a story
Speaker 1: about yourself. Yeah, and so despite your doubts, either way,
Speaker 1: you think of yourself as one whole, unified, unified person.
Speaker 1: You either believe in God or you don't, or you
Speaker 1: identify you have some narrative that's in between. You say
Speaker 1: I'm an agnostic or whatever. But this is just one
Speaker 1: case of a generally fascinating phenomenon to ponder. What if
Speaker 1: by asking parts of our brains separately, we would think
Speaker 1: different things about all kinds of stuff, have different feelings,
Speaker 1: make different judgments, make different moral judgments, be different people.
Speaker 1: Is anyone aspect of your brain more truly authentically you
Speaker 1: than another aspect of your brain? I mean they're both
Speaker 1: in your head right. So today this is sort of
Speaker 1: what we wanted to focus on to talk about some
Speaker 1: of these types of takeaways from split brain experiments and
Speaker 1: more recent research on split brain patients. So one really
Speaker 1: fascinating area of research we can look at is the
Speaker 1: idea of moral judgments. Robert, can I pose you a
Speaker 1: scenario and see what you think? Yes, go ahead, band
Speaker 1: or snatched me here? Okay? Oh yeah, you're taunting me
Speaker 1: with it every day. I still haven't seen it yet,
Speaker 1: but I will. Okay, here's the scenario. Grace and her
Speaker 1: friend are taking a tour of a chemical plant. Grace
Speaker 1: goes over to the coffee machine to pour some coffee.
Speaker 1: Grace's friend asks if Grace will put some sugar in hers,
Speaker 1: and there is a white powder in a container next
Speaker 1: to the coffee machine. The white powder is a very
Speaker 1: toxic substance left behind by a scientist and deadly when ingested.
Speaker 1: The container, however, is labeled sugar, so Grace believes that
Speaker 1: the white powder is regular sugar. Grace puts this white
Speaker 1: powder in her friend's coffee. Her friend drinks the coffee
Speaker 1: and dies. Now the question is, is what Grace did
Speaker 1: morally acceptable or not um given this scenario, I mean,
Speaker 1: it seems morally acceptable because she didn't know it was toxic.
Speaker 1: It was labeled sugar. Yeah, she was do and she
Speaker 1: was following a request. Yeah, so you are answering the
Speaker 1: question the way almost all adult adults tend to answer
Speaker 1: these questions, that what matters is the intention of the
Speaker 1: person doing the action. Uh So let me pose it
Speaker 1: another way. Same scenario. Grace and her friend or at
Speaker 1: a coffee. They're getting coffee at the chemical plant. Now
Speaker 1: it turns out that the white powder in the container
Speaker 1: is just sugar and it's fine, but it is labeled toxic.
Speaker 1: So Grace believes that the white powder is a toxic substance,
Speaker 1: but she's wrong. She puts it in her friend's coffee.
Speaker 1: It's actually just sugar. Her friend drinks it. Is what
Speaker 1: is what Grace did morally acceptable? Well, I would say
Speaker 1: it is forbidden because she attempted to poison a friend,
Speaker 1: exactly right. So yeah, this is how I would answer
Speaker 1: as well. This is how almost all adults tend to
Speaker 1: answer these questions. The fact is that in general, adults
Speaker 1: tend to think that intentions are highly morally relevant, so
Speaker 1: they usually say that a person who accidentally poisons a
Speaker 1: friend of theirs with no intent to harm them is
Speaker 1: not morally blame worthy, but somebody who intends to poison
Speaker 1: a friend, even if they fail at doing so, is
Speaker 1: morally blameworthy. And of course, like you know, there are
Speaker 1: many aspects that you see this put into practice around
Speaker 1: the world, and like legal injustice systems, a person is
Speaker 1: punished a lot more for trying to hurt someone on
Speaker 1: purpose than for hurting them by accident, though often sometimes
Speaker 1: they are still held responsible for hurting somebody growth negligent situation,
Speaker 1: you know. Uh, And that's like a middle category, right
Speaker 1: like if you didn't mean to hurt somebody, but you
Speaker 1: were doing something really reckless, send it hurt them. That's
Speaker 1: sort of like a middle culpability level, right like if
Speaker 1: you stored the toxic white powder next to the sugar
Speaker 1: and she just didn't look closely enough, like you really
Speaker 1: should you know that this place has as sugar and
Speaker 1: toxic poison. You should you should know to check which
Speaker 1: one you're scoop Getting lumps out of right, But we
Speaker 1: wouldn't think that Grace should have expected there to be
Speaker 1: poisoned right next to the coffee machine, right. And on
Speaker 1: the other hand, Grace, you can't expect Grace to just
Speaker 1: expect people to be trying to poisoning her all the
Speaker 1: time like they're they're they're certain cultural expectations in place
Speaker 1: here exactly. But the weird thing is not everyone answers
Speaker 1: scenarios this way. For example, previous research, including by the
Speaker 1: Swiss psychologist Jean piage Uh and others later, has found
Speaker 1: that young children and pj found this was up to
Speaker 1: about the age of nine or ten, tend to attribute
Speaker 1: moral guilt and deservingness of punishment in exactly the opposite way.
Speaker 1: They assigned guilt based on the active consequences of the
Speaker 1: action rather than to the knowledge or intentions of the agent,
Speaker 1: meaning that many young children will suggest that if Grace
Speaker 1: means to put sugar in her friend's coffee but accidentally
Speaker 1: poisons her friend, she is naughty. But if she tries
Speaker 1: to poison her friend and the poison doesn't work, she's fine.
Speaker 1: Well that sounds totally believable. I mean, I now that
Speaker 1: it's pointed out like that. You know, I can see
Speaker 1: I can see various aspects of that popping up in
Speaker 1: just raising a child, you know, where where they're gonna
Speaker 1: they're gonna going to jump to this conclusion. You know
Speaker 1: it certainly not with poisoning, but with just sort of
Speaker 1: the everyday minutia that fills your life. Well, they don't
Speaker 1: reason this way every time, Like sometimes intentions seem salient
Speaker 1: to them, but generally the rule is after about age ten,
Speaker 1: almost nobody ever thinks that accidentally harming someone is worse
Speaker 1: than intending to harm them and not harm in failing. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but this, I mean that I've seen this with my
Speaker 1: son though, where like he'll do something accidentally and then
Speaker 1: he's really hard on himself for having for for quote,
Speaker 1: being bad or having you know, done something bad and
Speaker 1: you have to reassure him you know this was you know,
Speaker 1: there was an accident, but you know it's all cool. Well,
Speaker 1: this is a fascinating phenomenon on its own. I mean,
Speaker 1: before we even get to how this applies to the
Speaker 1: split brain experiments for example, you know, I went back,
Speaker 1: I was like, is this really true? So I was
Speaker 1: reading some of Pj's work on this question from a
Speaker 1: book of his. And so here's one of the scenarios
Speaker 1: he describes when interviewing young children. Okay, the first one is,
Speaker 1: uh this, uh about this little boy named John, Robert,
Speaker 1: do you want to read about John? Sure? A little
Speaker 1: boy who is called John is in his room. He
Speaker 1: has called to dinner. He goes into the dining room.
Speaker 1: But behind the door there was a chair, and on
Speaker 1: the chair there was a tray with fifteen cups on it.
Speaker 1: John couldn't have known that there was all this behind
Speaker 1: the door. He goes in the door, knocks against the tray, Bang,
Speaker 1: go the fifteen cups and they all get broken. All right.
Speaker 1: Here's the other scenario. Once there was a little boy
Speaker 1: whose name was Henry. One day when his mother was out,
Speaker 1: he tried to get some jam out of the cupboard.
Speaker 1: He climbed up onto a chair and stretched out his arm,
Speaker 1: but the jam was too high up and he couldn't
Speaker 1: reach it and have any But while he was trying
Speaker 1: to get it, he knocked over a cup. The cup
Speaker 1: fell down and broke. Ah. So, yeah, we have a
Speaker 1: situation where John was just going about normal everyday. How
Speaker 1: stuff he didn't know where some stuff was. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: it stuff got broken. But Henry is trying to do
Speaker 1: something he shouldn't and then accidentally break something. But here then,
Speaker 1: PJ includes a little transcript of a dialogue with a
Speaker 1: six year old boy named Geo about these stories. Robert,
Speaker 1: do you want to be Geo? I'll be the child? Yes? Okay,
Speaker 1: have you understood these stories? Yes? What did the first
Speaker 1: boy do? He broke eleven cups? And the second one
Speaker 1: he broke a cup by moving roughly? Why did the
Speaker 1: swan break the cups because the door knocked them in
Speaker 1: the second he was clumsy when he was getting the
Speaker 1: jam the cup fell down? How did Geo become Richard O'Brien? Okay? No, sorry?
Speaker 1: Going on? Is one of the boys naughtier than the other?
Speaker 1: The first is because he knocked over twelve cups? If
Speaker 1: you were the daddy, which one would you punish most?
Speaker 1: To one who broke twelve cups? Why did he break them?
Speaker 1: The door shut too hard and knocked them. He didn't
Speaker 1: do it on purpose? And why did the other boy
Speaker 1: break a cup? He wanted to get the jam. He
Speaker 1: moved too far, the cup got a broken. Why did
Speaker 1: he want the jam? Because he was all alone? Because
Speaker 1: his mother, wasn't there have you got a brother, no,
Speaker 1: a little sister. Well, if it was you who had
Speaker 1: broken the twelve cups when you went into the room
Speaker 1: and your little sister had broken the one cup while
Speaker 1: she was trying to get the jam, which of you
Speaker 1: would be punished most severely? Me? Because I broke more
Speaker 1: within one cup. Robert. First of all, I'm gonna give
Speaker 1: a rave view to your creepy child voice. That was
Speaker 1: like a beau, a full riff raff French geo. I
Speaker 1: think I was trying to go for like a Damian
Speaker 1: child or something. But you know, Richard O'Brien is still
Speaker 1: pretty good. It's all for you riff raff. But this
Speaker 1: is illuminating. This shows, Uh, this shows how the six
Speaker 1: year old is thinking about these two scenarios in applying judgment. Yes,
Speaker 1: almost no adult reasons this way right right, So this
Speaker 1: on its own is fascinating to me. Why this discrepancy
Speaker 1: in the moral reasoning of children and adults? And what
Speaker 1: causes the change? You know? POJ says the change tends
Speaker 1: to happen somewhere in late childhood, you know, somewhere between
Speaker 1: like uh, like seven and nine or ten. This change
Speaker 1: really takes over and people still and the children start
Speaker 1: reasoning about moral intentions and moral knowledge as opposed to
Speaker 1: just the objective outcomes. Uh. One issue I think that
Speaker 1: plays into this maturation process in moral judgments is of
Speaker 1: course going to be the development of the sophistication of
Speaker 1: theory of mind, and theory of mind of course is
Speaker 1: the ability to understand that others have into mental states
Speaker 1: and imagine what those states are. But this clearly can't
Speaker 1: be the only factor, because most children develop theory of
Speaker 1: mind by around age five or so, and a significant
Speaker 1: number of them think outcomes matter more than intentions for
Speaker 1: guilt until around age nine or so, So there must
Speaker 1: be something else happening also, so they're able to either
Speaker 1: able to contemplate other mind states, and yet they're still
Speaker 1: sticking to this. Uh, this this harsh form of judgment. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And again, to be clear, not in every case, because
Speaker 1: sometimes children will seem to think intentions matter, but they
Speaker 1: clearly they they default to this far more than adults would. Now,
Speaker 1: there's one reason to think that, of course, theory of
Speaker 1: mind is important for making a mature moral judgments the
Speaker 1: kind adults make based on knowledge and intentions. For the
Speaker 1: obvious reason that when you make a judgment considering a
Speaker 1: state of mind, including the knowledge and intentions of the
Speaker 1: person who broke the cups or put the powder in
Speaker 1: the coffee or whatever, you need to imagine their state
Speaker 1: of mind, like you have to have that in your
Speaker 1: rain in order to evaluate whether they were guilty or not.
Speaker 1: And so in like two thousand and eight two thousand nine,
Speaker 1: researchers named Leanne Young and Rebecca Sacks used neuroimaging to
Speaker 1: find evidence that when you try to ascribe beliefs and
Speaker 1: intentions to other people, essentially when you practice theory of
Speaker 1: mind and you're thinking about other minds, it involves processes
Speaker 1: that are lateralized their primarily on one side of the brain,
Speaker 1: specifically in the right temporal parietal junction or TPJ. And
Speaker 1: in a two thousand nine study, Young and Sacks found
Speaker 1: that uh temporal parietal junction activity in the right hemisphere
Speaker 1: only appeared when people tried to assess the moral significance
Speaker 1: of things like accidental harms when you hurt somebody but
Speaker 1: you didn't mean to. So if I tell you a
Speaker 1: story about Jeffrey accidentally knocking somebody into the Grand Canyon
Speaker 1: and then I ask you to think about whether Jeffrey
Speaker 1: did something morally wrong or not. Whatever thinking you use
Speaker 1: to answer that question will probably we involve the t
Speaker 1: PJ on the right side. But oh, what if the
Speaker 1: part of your brain that's getting that's interacting with the
Speaker 1: language that poses this question to you, cannot retrieve information
Speaker 1: from the lateralized TPJ the right side the brain. Yes,
Speaker 1: so we're gonna look at the two thousand tens study
Speaker 1: from Neuropsychologia called Abnormal Moral Reasoning and Complete and partial
Speaker 1: calisotomy Patients by Miller, Senate, Armstrong, Young, King, Pagi, Fabri, Polinara,
Speaker 1: and Gazanaga. So the authors begin by looking at the
Speaker 1: state of affairs we just talked about, uh, with the
Speaker 1: you know, the localization in the right hemisphere of this
Speaker 1: part of the brain that's used in imagining other minds
Speaker 1: and making judgments about something like the intentions of somebody
Speaker 1: in reference to moral guilt and the right quote. These
Speaker 1: findings suggest that patients with disconnected hemispheres would provide abnormal
Speaker 1: moral judgments on accidental harms and fail old attempts to harm,
Speaker 1: since normal judgments in these cases require information about beliefs
Speaker 1: and intentions from the right brain to reach the judgmental
Speaker 1: processes in the left brain. So they ran a test.
Speaker 1: They used six split brain patients who have had either
Speaker 1: a partial or total sectioning of the corpus colosum and
Speaker 1: compared that with twenty two normal control subjects. Now verbally,
Speaker 1: so what they did is verbally out loud conducted interviews
Speaker 1: posing moral judgment scenarios like the sugar or poison story
Speaker 1: we talked about with Grace, but also other ones like
Speaker 1: it uh. They conducted these interviews verbally, asking the subjects
Speaker 1: about whether different types of action in the scenario were
Speaker 1: morally acceptable or not. And remember, of course, which hemisphere
Speaker 1: of the brain is the one primarily responsible for speech.
Speaker 1: It's the left. So if you're having a verbal interview
Speaker 1: with somebody, their left hemisphere is sort of like it's
Speaker 1: like the gatekeeper right that will in most cases be
Speaker 1: dominating the input and output of the brain you're interacting with,
Speaker 1: since the input and output is all spoken words. So
Speaker 1: if you have to give your answers in words coming
Speaker 1: from your left hemisphere and it can't communicate very well
Speaker 1: with your right hemisphere or at all with your right hemisphere,
Speaker 1: which is the home of an important part of the
Speaker 1: brain that used to think about the knowledge and intentions
Speaker 1: of other people. Your verbal answers on subjects requiring this
Speaker 1: kind of knowledge may very well be impaired, and the results,
Speaker 1: it turned out, supported this hypothesis. The control subjects, the
Speaker 1: people without split brains, they tended to judge just like
Speaker 1: we did earlier. Like they judged based on intentions, well,
Speaker 1: did grace mean to harm somebody or not? And that
Speaker 1: was the mainly salient thing. The split brain patients did
Speaker 1: so far less consistently, more often judging based purely on outcomes,
Speaker 1: the way many young children did and pj's work, and
Speaker 1: also to supplement their experiment, they tested two of the
Speaker 1: split brain patient's ability to detect hypothetical faux pause. For example,
Speaker 1: a person quote telling somebody how much they dislike a
Speaker 1: bowl while forgetting that the person had given them that
Speaker 1: bowl as a wedding present. Uh. And of course, the
Speaker 1: idea is that a person who's unable like if you're
Speaker 1: unable to give spoken answers involving the theory of mind
Speaker 1: function localized in the right TPJ, you will find it
Speaker 1: significantly harder to detect a faux paw which requires you
Speaker 1: to think about other minds, and the split brain difference
Speaker 1: held true here. Out of tin faux pause, they said,
Speaker 1: patient VP successfully detected only six and patient j W
Speaker 1: correctly identified only four, whereas control subjects all identified a
Speaker 1: hundred of the faux pause. So when they were given
Speaker 1: a scenario like that and asked did something awkward happen
Speaker 1: normal people? They detected every time. In fact, one of
Speaker 1: the things that I would say our brains are most
Speaker 1: highly suited for is detecting social awkwardness and stuff, right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: And it is interesting to notice this emerging in younger
Speaker 1: or children too, you know, like you see this kind
Speaker 1: of awareness coming online, you know where they're able to
Speaker 1: identify faux pause as opposed to just be like the
Speaker 1: master of folk pause. Well do you ever notice I
Speaker 1: wonder if like adolescence and teenage years are kind of
Speaker 1: an error. It's like it's a time when you were
Speaker 1: almost like hyper aware of social awkwardness. Does that ring
Speaker 1: true to you? Um to a certain extent? But I
Speaker 1: don't know. I've run into some teens who I mean,
Speaker 1: there are a lot of different types of brains out there,
Speaker 1: but I mean I've run into some teams that that
Speaker 1: definitely have a lot of social awkwardness or or definitely
Speaker 1: walk into a lot of faux pas. So I don't know. Well,
Speaker 1: I mean, just because you are awkward doesn't mean you're
Speaker 1: not aware of awkwardness, right, Yeah, certainly awkwardness does seem
Speaker 1: to define that buried in one's life. That would be
Speaker 1: that might be something to come back to. I know
Speaker 1: we've done episodes in the past on the teenage brain,
Speaker 1: in the particular aspects of the team age brain. I
Speaker 1: wonder if there's a if there's an entire episode on
Speaker 1: the science of awkwardness. Well, I think we should take
Speaker 1: a quick break and then when we come back we
Speaker 1: can discuss this study a little more than alright, we're back,
Speaker 1: all right. So we've just discussed this study about split
Speaker 1: brain patients and moral judgments and found that split brain patients,
Speaker 1: at least in this one study, made moral judgments based
Speaker 1: on outcomes rather than on intentions, more like children sometimes
Speaker 1: do instead of the way that adults normally do. Um,
Speaker 1: And this is fascinating. Now, of course, we should acknowledge
Speaker 1: some potential drawbacks of this experiment. Like all split brain studies,
Speaker 1: by necessity, it's a small sample, right, you know, there
Speaker 1: aren't that many of these people out there, and even
Speaker 1: a smaller subset of them want to participate in experiments
Speaker 1: like this, But so it's almost on the scale of anecdote,
Speaker 1: so you have to be careful about drawing strong conclusions
Speaker 1: from the results. Also, there are some other detailed complications
Speaker 1: in the study, such as questions about why the effect
Speaker 1: also manifested impartial calisotomy patients, so when the authors had
Speaker 1: not expected it to they thought it would only appear
Speaker 1: in the full calisotomy patients. And then also about where
Speaker 1: the exact side of decoding the beliefs of others is located.
Speaker 1: Maybe it's not exactly the TPJ but more anterior to it.
Speaker 1: Uh So that's some peripheral issues. But nevertheless, if we
Speaker 1: tentatively accept these results like how fascinating, and it leads
Speaker 1: to these questions like here's one. You know we discussed
Speaker 1: in the last episode that despite the radical nature of
Speaker 1: the surgery that cuts the corpus colossum and the amazing
Speaker 1: neurological anomalies that can arise from it under lab conditions,
Speaker 1: generally most patients and patient families report totally normal functionality
Speaker 1: no major changes in personality or behavior after the surgery.
Speaker 1: If it's changing their moral reasoning in in this kind
Speaker 1: of way, how could that be possible? I mean yeah,
Speaker 1: because certainly from your own standpoint, I mean, you were
Speaker 1: if you're moral compass has changed than you I mean,
Speaker 1: you can't see the forest for the trees, right, But
Speaker 1: but you're gonna be surrounded by other people who would
Speaker 1: be able to identify the change. But presumably yeah, you
Speaker 1: would think so, I mean if there is actually a change.
Speaker 1: So uh. And and also like, yeah, you think that
Speaker 1: moral judgments sort of go to the heart of a
Speaker 1: person's personality, right, like that that is your character, that
Speaker 1: is who you are as a person, or at least
Speaker 1: how you think about that subject. Right. You would think
Speaker 1: there would be anecdotes out there about like, yeah, my
Speaker 1: uncle had this surgery and then his like his his
Speaker 1: political ideology changed afterwards, or yeah you have been something
Speaker 1: to that effect. But we have not seen that in
Speaker 1: referenced in any of these studies. So, if these results
Speaker 1: from this two thousand ten studies are sound, what accounts
Speaker 1: for the discrepancy here? And the authors they posit three
Speaker 1: possible answers. One is, well, maybe there are profound personality
Speaker 1: changes in split brain patients that have gone unnoticed or unreported.
Speaker 1: They don't think this is very likely because quote, most
Speaker 1: reports from family members suggest no changes in mental functions
Speaker 1: or personality, and early studies that thoroughly tested patients pre
Speaker 1: and postoperatively reported no changes in cognitive functioning. So they
Speaker 1: feel pretty robustly that these patients in their day to
Speaker 1: day lives are not really changed. The other possibility as well.
Speaker 1: Maybe it's just because the judgment tasks here have no
Speaker 1: relevance to real life. But I mean, we use judgments
Speaker 1: like this all the time, like did somebody mean to
Speaker 1: do something that? That seems like something that comes up
Speaker 1: every day? Yeah, I mean I jokingly brought up Bandersnatch
Speaker 1: the Town Adventure Black Mirror episode on Netflix earlier, But
Speaker 1: like I I found myself in watching that, like having
Speaker 1: to make choices about moral choices for the character. I
Speaker 1: found myself very uncomfortable with with choices that that I
Speaker 1: found morally reprehensible, even though it's just purely hypothetical. It's
Speaker 1: just a story, right, all right? What else do we have?
Speaker 1: What other possible answers? Well, the third possibility is what
Speaker 1: the researchers think is probably the case, which is that
Speaker 1: even though this impairment is manifested in the lab, in
Speaker 1: reality it somehow gets compensated for somehow in daily life.
Speaker 1: Other brain regions and functions or alternative processes kick in
Speaker 1: to counteract whatever is causing people to give these unusual
Speaker 1: answers in the lab condition. The brain finds a way, yes,
Speaker 1: so what would it be, Well, what about a version
Speaker 1: of something not exactly but something like the system one
Speaker 1: versus system to schema. Of course, now, of course we
Speaker 1: can remind people what the system one in the system
Speaker 1: to themes are. Well, it's like, basically like the different
Speaker 1: ways of dealing with the threat of the tiger. There's
Speaker 1: the way of dealing with the tiger by avoiding it
Speaker 1: and not going to the places where the tiger is,
Speaker 1: and then there's the way of dealing with the tiger
Speaker 1: where you have to fight it re flee from it.
Speaker 1: So I think we'd have the order inverted there. But yeah,
Speaker 1: so like system too is generally considered to be like
Speaker 1: low deliberate, methodical, logical thinking about how to solve problems,
Speaker 1: whereas system one is fast, reactive, intuitive, implicit right punch
Speaker 1: the tiger in the nose and run for it. And
Speaker 1: we need both for life. I mean, system to reactions
Speaker 1: might be less likely to give us erroneous results. But
Speaker 1: you don't have time to use system to thinking on everything.
Speaker 1: You know, you're trying to get through life. Most of
Speaker 1: the time. You need to make quick judgments that are
Speaker 1: not overly concerned. You know, you can't overthink, like which
Speaker 1: foot I'm gonna put in front of the other right now? Right? Yeah,
Speaker 1: So so you've got to be prepared for either tiger,
Speaker 1: the distance tiger or the close tiger. And so maybe
Speaker 1: the idea here is that the right TPJ is somehow
Speaker 1: necessary for making fast implicit system one type decisions about
Speaker 1: judging more, you know, the moral valance of an action
Speaker 1: and imagining theory of mind. But that you can if
Speaker 1: you can't do that, you can somehow do the same thing.
Speaker 1: It just takes longer, and it's is a more difficult,
Speaker 1: deliberate process that the brain has to go through if
Speaker 1: it can't rely on this brain region that does does
Speaker 1: this fast for you normally the author's right quote. If
Speaker 1: the patients do not have access to the fast implicit
Speaker 1: systems for ascribing beliefs to others. Their initial automatic moral
Speaker 1: judgments might not take into account beliefs of others, but
Speaker 1: you know, they're slow reason deliberate thinking system can compensate,
Speaker 1: it can kick in. Then again, I mean, I wonder
Speaker 1: how this, if this is the case, and we'll discuss
Speaker 1: this a little more, how this wouldn't manifest in normal life,
Speaker 1: because I feel like we use the fast intuitive system
Speaker 1: one type process to make morally relevant judgments all the time.
Speaker 1: I mean, we're constantly making sort of unfair moral judgments
Speaker 1: about things that would not you know, they're not using
Speaker 1: the kind of reasoning that you would sit down and
Speaker 1: deliberate about. Think about how often you get mad at
Speaker 1: somebody because they do something accidentally, and if you were
Speaker 1: forced to stop and think about it, you're like, Okay,
Speaker 1: no they didn't, they didn't mean to do that. There's
Speaker 1: no reason to morally blame them. You just get mad
Speaker 1: in the moment and you're just like, why are you
Speaker 1: in my way? Or why did you do that? Yeah? Yeah, totally.
Speaker 1: This is you know, this like the the other split
Speaker 1: brain experiments we're looking at, though it reminds me of say,
Speaker 1: if you're watching a three D film and you have
Speaker 1: the glasses on, and then you take the glasses off,
Speaker 1: and you you you see that there is there's there's
Speaker 1: some sort of uh uh, you know, there's a lack
Speaker 1: of unity there. Or it's like you're you're staring through
Speaker 1: the stereo view and then you look at the card
Speaker 1: and you see that it's two images side by side
Speaker 1: to create the united whole. Like it's it's a glimpse
Speaker 1: at the duality that that is making the at least,
Speaker 1: you know, the sort of the illusion, the experience of
Speaker 1: the whole possible. Um. But but but then it's it's
Speaker 1: we we shouldn't fall under the we shouldn't then fall
Speaker 1: into the trap of thinking that it is dual by nature.
Speaker 1: It's like taking the US is up and saying, oh,
Speaker 1: the world is really red, the world is really blue. Well, no, no,
Speaker 1: that the world is the thing that comes together. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And and the glasses are designed to give you this
Speaker 1: three D image the same way that the brain is
Speaker 1: designed by evolution to have compensating processes, to have one
Speaker 1: way of doing something or another way of doing something
Speaker 1: depending on the situational need. And so, of course I
Speaker 1: indicated that the authors tend to think this third answer
Speaker 1: is probably the correct one about the compensating mechanism taking
Speaker 1: over in real life scenarios. Uh And as evidence, they
Speaker 1: cite the fact that in the experiment, split brain patients
Speaker 1: would sometimes spontaneously blurred out a rationalization of an answer
Speaker 1: that ignored intentions, almost as if after giving the answer
Speaker 1: out loud that ignored intentions, they realized something was wrong
Speaker 1: with it. So here's one example. A split brain patient
Speaker 1: named JW hurt a scenario where a waitress thought that
Speaker 1: serving sesame seeds to a customer would give him a
Speaker 1: terrible allergic reaction. She thought he was allergic to sesame seeds.
Speaker 1: She tried, she served him sesame seeds, but it turns
Speaker 1: out he wasn't actually allergic. She was wrong about that,
Speaker 1: and the seeds didn't hurt him, even though she thought
Speaker 1: they would. J W said the waitress had done nothing wrong.
Speaker 1: Then he paused for a few moments, then spontaneously blurted out,
Speaker 1: sesame seeds are tiny little things. They don't hurt nobody,
Speaker 1: you know. It's it's almost as if he was searching
Speaker 1: for a post talk rationalization of an answer he'd already given,
Speaker 1: but which began to seem wrong to him as it
Speaker 1: sank in, you know, given a few more seconds to
Speaker 1: think about it, and the patient j W alone, they
Speaker 1: reported spontaneously blurted out rationalizations like this in five of
Speaker 1: the twenty four scenarios, so like more than a fifth,
Speaker 1: and again, I just think back to the fact, you know,
Speaker 1: post talk rationalization is a huge part of life. We
Speaker 1: talked about this in the last episode with the the
Speaker 1: writer and the elephant, right, like, how often do we
Speaker 1: do things that honestly we don't understand why we did them,
Speaker 1: but we just come up with a story, and we
Speaker 1: even believe that story ourselves as an explanation for why
Speaker 1: we did it. But you can see clear evidence that
Speaker 1: that is not the reason. Right, Yeah, you end up
Speaker 1: telling yourself, well I wanted that product, or perhaps oh
Speaker 1: well you might even you know, you might even end
Speaker 1: up telling you so the st of the story about
Speaker 1: how you were tricked into buying it. But but there
Speaker 1: is some sort of rationalization about the about the movements
Speaker 1: of the beast beneath you. Alright, on that note, we're
Speaker 1: going to take another break, but we'll be right back.
Speaker 1: Than all right, we're back, Okay, I think we should
Speaker 1: take a look at another study about moral judgment and
Speaker 1: the division of the brain hemispheres. So this is one
Speaker 1: from Royal Society Open Science from called moral judgment by
Speaker 1: the disconnected left and right cerebral hemispheres, a split brain investigation,
Speaker 1: and this is by Steckler, Hamlin, Miller, King and Kingstone. Uh.
Speaker 1: And when you get king and Kingstone together, you never
Speaker 1: know what's gonna happen. So to recap from the last study,
Speaker 1: we know that lots of parts of the brain are
Speaker 1: used in making moral judgments, including you know, regions and
Speaker 1: networks in the left hemisphere such as the the left
Speaker 1: medial prefrontal cortex, the left temporal parietal junction, and the
Speaker 1: left singulate. But in order to make moral decisions based
Speaker 1: on people's intentions, when you're imagining what other people mean
Speaker 1: to do and what they know, we seem to require
Speaker 1: use of an area in or around the area mentioned
Speaker 1: in the last study, the right tempo parietal junction or rTPJ.
Speaker 1: And it seems that without it you can't properly imagine
Speaker 1: other people's intentions and beliefs to make a quick moral judgment.
Speaker 1: So here's a question. Then the right hemisphere seems necessary
Speaker 1: in making a quick moral judgment in the normal way
Speaker 1: based on people's intent, But is it sufficient Could the
Speaker 1: right hemisphere alone make a judgment? So the authors try
Speaker 1: to find out with the help of a split brain patient.
Speaker 1: They write, quote, here we use non linguistic morality plays
Speaker 1: with split brain patient j W to examine the moral
Speaker 1: judgments of the disconnected right hemisphere. So obviously you've got
Speaker 1: a problem if you're trying to just talk to the
Speaker 1: right hemisphere, because the right hemisphere is not going to
Speaker 1: do super well at understanding a verbal scenario you describe
Speaker 1: to them. Right it doesn't want to listen to you
Speaker 1: tell a story. It doesn't want a lot of dialogue.
Speaker 1: It just wants some sweet, muted YouTube action the silent
Speaker 1: film hemisphere. And again not to not to be overly simplistic,
Speaker 1: because we do know from some research that the right
Speaker 1: brain does seem to understand some language, it's just not
Speaker 1: nearly as linguistically sophisticated as the left hemisphere. Um So
Speaker 1: they use these nonverbal videos of people trying to help
Speaker 1: someone and succeeding or failing, or trying to thwart someone
Speaker 1: and succeeding or failing. So an example might be somebody's
Speaker 1: trying to get something down off of a high shelf,
Speaker 1: and then somebody either like bumps into them to try
Speaker 1: to knock them off the shelf or tries to help
Speaker 1: them get the thing down or something like that. And
Speaker 1: then they had j W watch all these videos and
Speaker 1: point with the finger of a specific hand which is
Speaker 1: controlled by the opposite hemisphere, to indicate which character was nicer.
Speaker 1: So in a series of test sessions like this over
Speaker 1: the course of a year, they found that JW was
Speaker 1: able to make pretty normal intent based judgments with his
Speaker 1: right hemisphere alone pointing with his left hand, but had
Speaker 1: a lot more trouble making intent based judgments with the
Speaker 1: left left hemisphere, in some cases seeming to respond almost
Speaker 1: at random with the left hemisphere. And yet the left
Speaker 1: hemisphere is the hemisphere that the talks, so there were
Speaker 1: more signs of the left hemisphere making up ex post
Speaker 1: facto justifications when it did not understand what what the
Speaker 1: person had done. For example, after one video, when asked
Speaker 1: why he made the choice he did of which character
Speaker 1: was nicer, JW just offered the rationalization that blonds can't
Speaker 1: be trusted. When one of the actors in the video
Speaker 1: was blonde. So here's one question why the discrepancy with
Speaker 1: the last study. In the last study, the left hemisphere
Speaker 1: defaulted more often in making moral judgments based on, remember
Speaker 1: the objective good or bad outcomes, rather than people's intentions.
Speaker 1: Why did it seem to make judgments at random this time?
Speaker 1: So the authors say, maybe in the previous study it's
Speaker 1: because subjects were explicitly asked to judge whether a behavior
Speaker 1: was morally acceptable or not, and in this study instead,
Speaker 1: the subject was just asked who's nicer, Maybe to the
Speaker 1: left hemisphere, you know, separated and on its own devices.
Speaker 1: Maybe it doesn't use any kind of moral reasoning to
Speaker 1: judge who is nicer, but uses some other kind of rubric.
Speaker 1: Maybe nicer means something non moral to it. Then again,
Speaker 1: there's also the possibility, well, you know, we're again limited
Speaker 1: to small sample sizes, in this case very small of
Speaker 1: just one patient. So it's possible that maybe JW is
Speaker 1: just unusual. That's always a thing to consider with this
Speaker 1: kind of study, and it's what you know, unfortunately, what
Speaker 1: what this sort of research is by nature limited to
Speaker 1: one of the things that I think is interesting and
Speaker 1: looking at this research, we we've looked at today with
Speaker 1: the different kinds of moral reasoning in the different hemispheres,
Speaker 1: is that we see again the role of something that
Speaker 1: we talked about in in part one of this series
Speaker 1: back in the first episode, about the role of what's
Speaker 1: thought of as the interpreter, or at least in Michael
Speaker 1: Gazzaniga's theory, that the interpreter in the left hemisphere. So
Speaker 1: the idea is, of course, that your brain constantly makes
Speaker 1: up stories to explain why you just did what you did.
Speaker 1: But split brain research indicates that we have no guarantee
Speaker 1: that the stories we give to explain our own behaviors
Speaker 1: have any explanatory power at all. A lot of times
Speaker 1: it seems more like they are just confabulated post talk rationalizations,
Speaker 1: that you just came up with something to explain something
Speaker 1: you did when you really have no idea why you
Speaker 1: did what you did. The brain just pulled it out
Speaker 1: of its own button. If the brain had a butt.
Speaker 1: In the previous experiments, this had to do with stuff
Speaker 1: like why did you draw this picture you know? Or
Speaker 1: why did you pick this object out of a drawer
Speaker 1: with your left hand when you couldn't name that object
Speaker 1: in speech, or anything like that, and people would make
Speaker 1: up excuses. Now you you see a similar kind of
Speaker 1: thing perhaps going on with making moral judgments. And I
Speaker 1: think that there is some research that this is indicative
Speaker 1: not just of something about split brain patients, but of
Speaker 1: something larger about this phenomenon of interpretation in the left
Speaker 1: hemisphere and of the human condition itself. Yeah, like we've
Speaker 1: we've touched on in this episode Sode, in the previous episode,
Speaker 1: and in any other episodes before. It's like there's always
Speaker 1: a story that is told, right, We're constantly telling a
Speaker 1: story about ourselves, and that story involves rationalizations, rationalizations for
Speaker 1: our actions and uh and interpretations of who we are
Speaker 1: and why we're doing everything we do exactly. And it
Speaker 1: happens in multiple level. It happens to explain why you
Speaker 1: have why you took certain actions that you can't actually explain.
Speaker 1: It happens to explain why your mood changes. Because Aniga
Speaker 1: writes about this that there are these cases where you
Speaker 1: can have somebody who's has a mood shift triggered, like
Speaker 1: for example, you get you have split brain patients where
Speaker 1: you show some positive or negative mood, triggering stimulus to
Speaker 1: the right hemisphere, and then the speaking part of the
Speaker 1: brain expresses being upset, but then we'll be unable to
Speaker 1: express why, and we'll just make up a story about why, like, well,
Speaker 1: because you did this thing that made me upset. And crucially,
Speaker 1: I think it seems to be the case that when
Speaker 1: we make up stories like this, they're not just you know,
Speaker 1: they're not just outward facing. It's not just pr for
Speaker 1: the brain, it's inward facing. We are convincing our cell
Speaker 1: that this made up story is correct. Yeah, it helps
Speaker 1: create like the internal reality that we cling to. Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1: And so it's it's interesting, I think, to notice that
Speaker 1: this appears to be linked to the brain's capacity for language. That,
Speaker 1: at least, according to Kazaniga's theory here, if he's correct,
Speaker 1: the part of the brain that makes up explanations for
Speaker 1: why something happened is also highly associated with the part
Speaker 1: of the brain that is able to talk about things.
Speaker 1: And that very well might not be an accident. It
Speaker 1: seems possible there's a link between the networks of the
Speaker 1: brain that have the most to do with generating conscious
Speaker 1: experience and the networks of the brain that are able
Speaker 1: to put things into words. And that's fascinating alright. So
Speaker 1: under under Gazaniga's ideas here, the consciousness generating capacity is
Speaker 1: located primarily in the left hemisphere. And what happens when
Speaker 1: you have a split brain patient is you essentially cut
Speaker 1: off the conscious part of the brain's access to half
Speaker 1: of what the brain is doing, right, Yeah, though that
Speaker 1: half of the brain is still over there doing stuff. Yeah.
Speaker 1: With with each example that we we we pull out here,
Speaker 1: each each study, it is still very difficult to really grasp.
Speaker 1: You know. It's it's again this kind of you can't
Speaker 1: see the forest for the tree situation. It's hard to
Speaker 1: imagine the consciousness we're experiencing, uh, in a in a
Speaker 1: system that's been divided, you know. Well, yeah, that's one
Speaker 1: thing that that's so interesting here. I think one way
Speaker 1: you could misunderstand what the split brain cases show is
Speaker 1: that if you cut the brain in half, you generate
Speaker 1: two conscious, independent people. And that appears to not be
Speaker 1: the case. People still get the man with two brains,
Speaker 1: like with Steve Martin, right, you get one conscious experience.
Speaker 1: The person generally does not report feeling any different, as
Speaker 1: we talked about last time, Their behavior and stuff is
Speaker 1: generally about the same as it was before, except you
Speaker 1: have the ability to show under certain conditions, there's this
Speaker 1: whole half of the brain over there doing things that
Speaker 1: you cannot be conscious of or put into words. So
Speaker 1: it can still sense, it can still control the body
Speaker 1: is just apparently not integrating or synthesizing into whatever creates
Speaker 1: your conscious experience, which I mean in a way that
Speaker 1: is that that is sort of like having the other
Speaker 1: fellow in there, in the words of Robert Louis Stevenson.
Speaker 1: Now to bring up another literary example. We've talked about
Speaker 1: Peter Watt's book Blindside on the program before. I'm sure
Speaker 1: you remember the character Siri Keaton, who loses his brains
Speaker 1: left hemisphere to infection, and and and and and as
Speaker 1: a result of that, entire hemisphere is largely or entirely
Speaker 1: replaced with like a cybernetic implant. Yes, and this creates
Speaker 1: a lot of the strange psychology of the narrator in
Speaker 1: that book. Yes, yes, I can help and think of that.
Speaker 1: When we were talking about this, also, I was reminded
Speaker 1: of a character in the book Consider Felibus by Ian M. Banks,
Speaker 1: who who has tweaked his brain so that you can
Speaker 1: engage in uni hemispheric sleep. We didn't even get into
Speaker 1: that in in this episode. But of course this is
Speaker 1: something that for instance, dolphins can do. Uh, it can't
Speaker 1: just go to sleep, so they'll put one side of
Speaker 1: their brain, one hemisphere of the brain to sleep at
Speaker 1: a time. And so and then that particular book, it
Speaker 1: was he was probably leaning a little bit into sort
Speaker 1: of the left brain right brain myth a bit, but
Speaker 1: he was discussing how if one side of the human
Speaker 1: brain is sleeping and then only one side is awake,
Speaker 1: you are going to have a different expression of that individual. Now,
Speaker 1: if the Gazonica model of consciousness is correct, Uh, that
Speaker 1: wouldn't make me wonder that if a human were capable
Speaker 1: of uni hemispheric sleep, would the human be conscious while
Speaker 1: the right brain is sleeping and not conscious while the
Speaker 1: left brain is sleeping, and yet while the left brain
Speaker 1: is sleeping, still awake, just not conscious. Well, I guess
Speaker 1: you'd ultimately and then you'd have to work out exactly
Speaker 1: how this would work in a human scenario. But you
Speaker 1: as long as one side would be awake to alert
Speaker 1: the other side when full brain alertness was required, you
Speaker 1: know that would that would be the main prerequisite. I
Speaker 1: just thought to look this up. I wish I thought
Speaker 1: before we came in here, whether there are any lateralization
Speaker 1: properties of sleepwalking. Oh, that would be good too. Well,
Speaker 1: we we need to come back and discuss sleepwalking in
Speaker 1: in depth, because I'm sure there's a whole episode just
Speaker 1: right there. We've done some episodes on what paras omnia
Speaker 1: in the past, like sort of covering various weird sleep phenomena.
Speaker 1: But yeah, that would be a fun one to come
Speaker 1: back to, for sure. You know. Speaking of Peter Watts,
Speaker 1: I remember he's written about this idea of if thoughts
Speaker 1: were inserted into your brain from the outside, would you
Speaker 1: even perceive them as alien or would you just perceive
Speaker 1: them as self? Because Gazzaniga's left brain interpreter model might
Speaker 1: be totally wrong, of course, but let's just assume for
Speaker 1: a minute that it is correct. Things happen unconsciously in
Speaker 1: modules all throughout the brain, and then regions in the
Speaker 1: left hemisphere have the job of synthesizing all that activity
Speaker 1: and generating a story that explains to you why your
Speaker 1: brain just did something. And this interpreter function is somehow
Speaker 1: crucial to what we think of as the human experience
Speaker 1: of consciousness. Consciousness is sort of is this story we
Speaker 1: tell about why we're doing things and who we are now. Normally,
Speaker 1: if something enters your left visual field, goes to the
Speaker 1: right hemisphere, gets processed there, and then travels to the
Speaker 1: interpreter and the left hemisphere through the corpus closum. That
Speaker 1: doesn't feel like you're getting that thought or information or
Speaker 1: experience from somewhere else. It's all just self. It all
Speaker 1: just gets interpreted and it's you. So if we were
Speaker 1: to start using some kind of brain to brain interface
Speaker 1: or a computer to brain interface where it were possible
Speaker 1: to transmit thoughts into the brain from outside, and who
Speaker 1: knows if that's really possible, of course, but just assume
Speaker 1: would we be able to tell the externally inserted thoughts
Speaker 1: the sort of incoming brain mail from activity arising in
Speaker 1: networks and modules natively throughout the brain itself, or would
Speaker 1: it just all go to the interpreter the same way.
Speaker 1: So you could send an alien thought into somebody's head
Speaker 1: and have them immediately rationalize it as part of the
Speaker 1: interpret itself the same way they would if it came
Speaker 1: from some network in the right hemisphere, would they just think, yep,
Speaker 1: this is just me thinking I feel like we're borderline
Speaker 1: there with certain individuals in their use of smartphones. Oh yeah,
Speaker 1: where imagine you and I'm listeners out there, you've had
Speaker 1: a similar experience. We would be in a conversation with
Speaker 1: someone and they'll without a phone to remember something. But
Speaker 1: but but often like not in a way where it's like,
Speaker 1: oh yeah, I forget that, let me research it, More like,
Speaker 1: let me access this part of my memory. Yes, I
Speaker 1: know exactly what you mean, and I, um, I don't know.
Speaker 1: I mean I wonder what the processes by which the
Speaker 1: interpreter function. Again, just assuming this model of the interpreter
Speaker 1: and the conscious experience is correct, mean this, you know,
Speaker 1: this might be mistaken. But if this is correct, what
Speaker 1: is the rubric it uses to decide what gets integrated
Speaker 1: as self? And what what does it decide is alien?
Speaker 1: That's a great question. We'll have to come back to
Speaker 1: that in the future. Maybe there is none. Maybe it's
Speaker 1: also maybe there's no future. Oh there's maybe there's no self. Yes, well,
Speaker 1: you know it also brings up the question, you know,
Speaker 1: are we limited our Is our identity limited by the
Speaker 1: things that we have at our disposal in our mind?
Speaker 1: Do you count the things that we we have to
Speaker 1: depend upon, that we have externalized, you know, And I
Speaker 1: feel like that is part of the modern human experience,
Speaker 1: has been part of the human experience for a while.
Speaker 1: I mean, if an author writes, say, thirty books, um,
Speaker 1: and that author cannot repeat them from memory, they are
Speaker 1: not a part of his his or her mind. Uh,
Speaker 1: then you know, how do you weigh that into the
Speaker 1: equation of self? Yeah? Exactly. And what if you didn't
Speaker 1: write them? What if these are just books that you
Speaker 1: have incorporated into your thinking about things? Are those now
Speaker 1: a part of your brain? If you know that, you
Speaker 1: could consult them in order to figure out what you
Speaker 1: think about something, but you can't do it without consulting them. Yeah,
Speaker 1: what if it's a book that you've written and you've forgotten.
Speaker 1: I believe Stephen King has a couple of examples of
Speaker 1: that right wherever he doesn't remember writing a particular novel.
Speaker 1: I think one example was Coujo. He said they didn't
Speaker 1: remember writing it because he was on drugs. Yeah, so
Speaker 1: it's Kujo a part of Stephen King likewise, I mean,
Speaker 1: there we all have, prehaps the books, films, etcetera, some
Speaker 1: sort of external influence that has been important at one
Speaker 1: point in our life, and then is discarded later and
Speaker 1: then sometimes pick back up again. Oh, there's an extremely
Speaker 1: strong social component here. Lots of people figure out what
Speaker 1: they think about something by checking to see what somebody
Speaker 1: else thinks about it, whether that's a person you know
Speaker 1: known to them, or some public figure that they you know,
Speaker 1: derive opinions from. Yeah, and you know what, I'm gonna
Speaker 1: go ahead and take a stand. That's not behavior I
Speaker 1: encourage do not do not trust another person as much
Speaker 1: as you trust your own, right hemisphere, don't just directly
Speaker 1: incorporate their their information as as self. I can agree
Speaker 1: with that. Yes, all right, well there you have it.
Speaker 1: We're gonna go ahead and cap off these two episodes
Speaker 1: Part one, Part two, Hemisphere, left hemisphere right if you will, Uh,
Speaker 1: if you want to check out other episodes of Stuff
Speaker 1: to Blow your Mind, you know where to go. Head
Speaker 1: on over to stuff to Blow your Mind dot com.
Speaker 1: That's the mothership. That's where we'll find all the episodes
Speaker 1: of the show. And don't forget about Invention at invention
Speaker 1: pod dot com. That is the website for our other show, Invention,
Speaker 1: which comes out every Monday. It is it's very much
Speaker 1: a you know, a sister show to Stuff to Blow
Speaker 1: your Mind. It covers a lot of the sort of
Speaker 1: topics that we've covered on Stuff to Blow your Mind
Speaker 1: in the past, So it's, you know, I wouldn't say
Speaker 1: it's a you know, radically different show, but it's one
Speaker 1: that if if you're a fan of Stuff to Blow
Speaker 1: your Mind, you should subscribe to Invention. And perhaps you're
Speaker 1: even the type of person who you're like, you know what,
Speaker 1: I like being mentioned episodes the most, Maybe I'll just
Speaker 1: stick with Invention. That's fine too. Yeah, we basically applied
Speaker 1: the same kind of mindset we do on the show
Speaker 1: here to scientific topics and cultural topics. Over there, we
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Speaker 1: Thanks as always to our excellent audio producers Alex Williams
Speaker 1: and Tory Harrison. If you would like to get in
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