Noah’s banjo-brain-surgery video reminded me of one of the cooler psych 101 experiments, involving patients with a severed corpus callossum. We can cause “sham rage” with lesions in certain areas, and screw with people’s memory in others, but the most fun (and sometimes not horribly unethical!) thing we can do is split their fucking brain in half. The video is kinda long, but basically we know that the brain areas used to control speech are in the dominant hemisphere, so if you send visual information to only the non-dominant hemisphere, it recognizes it (and can point to it, or draw it), but the dominant brain we’d use to actually recall the object’s name and say it is cut off. Fun times ensue when we send information to both brains.
October 21st, 2008 - 5:36 pm
So does he go through his life always looking to the left of things that he wants to describe?
Also, is this a common mistake in brain surgery?
October 21st, 2008 - 5:50 pm
It wasn’t a mistake; it was done to reduce the severity of his seizures. Very rare procedure, obviously. And he says in the beginning that he doesn’t really notice any difference. The experiment works because by focusing only on the dot, he’s blocking out half the information we’d normally receive.