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