Recently, I finished Michael Gazzaniga's book, Tales from Both Sides of the Brain: A Life in Neuroscience, a book on his personal human experience, and his time researching split-brain patients amongst neuroscience breakthroughs.
What is a split brain?
A split-brain individual is someone who's had a section down the midline of their brain separating the two hemispheres severed to a degree. Various depths of "split brains" can be observed, but the general idea is that "some" information is no longer being transfered. The catch, however, is that the brain has tricks to bypass this.
Ideas on split brains
It goes without saying, much of science requires inference, and where inference dwells also exists margins of error. But, I believe these inferences are all too human, and take us to places of error-correction and transformational ideas.
The book in question clearly lays out a half-a-century history of brain-debate with interesting conclusions, detailing it as a necessity that our ideas conflict to converge on something better. For the winners.
The book also gives a great example of adjustable (or personal?) relativity with respect the idea of modularity, something I will often write about. Adjustable relativity, as I see it, is an idea that can be interpreted (with effort) by a few given ideological disciplines, but at the core it's just a very horizontal idea that can mean anything.
An Atheist as rationality and subjective truth.
A Buddhist as suffering*.
A Christian as doctrinal theology*.
A scientist as skepticism and empiricism.
A passive nihilist as belief for the sake of belief.
A post-modernists as infinite interpretations.
But, what story do split brain patients tell about life being relative? A few examples.
Say a 4x4 table with random squares filled is projected to each one of your eyes, like below:
After a grid is projected to each of your individual eyes, they will be taken away for a moment and a new grid will be projected. Your job? Detect if the squares are the same. In the above example, the left sequence is wrong, and the right sequence is correct.
The catch? Non-split-brain (fully communicative brains) failed at this test miserably, whereas split-brain patients completed it. Separate local memory systems are the theory. Relative memory.
Relative memory is also semi-present in Kannehman and Taversky's anchoring studies that find that guessing a number for a given question is influenced by previous answers.
But what is the idea here? The idea of relativity? Maybe, but I don't want to fall into the trap of being too broad since anything can be said with a broad idea (like Freud - sexuality, communism - power). Maybe, instead, the concept lies in the human ability to both adapt and hold true to what has kept itself alive.
Then, with that concept in mind, studies citing biases like sunk cost, anchoring, emotions, so-forth, are functions of that need to ensure our survival isn't bounded by the "spirit of gravity" (Nietzsche).
For our ideologies themselves are dynamic sums of components that generate the experience of wholeness. When one is disproven or challenged, the corpus of belief compensates and finds ways around. Within debate and conversation, one would find great benefit in finding commonality between ones components (or sub-beliefs), and pointing out sublte differences.
What happens when your components conflict without realising? This idea will be analysed in detail in another article.
So how does this tie into split-brain patients?
Split brain relativity
Through the book, it is presented as-if our unsplit left brain sees the right half of our view, and the right brain sees the left half of our view, of which a stitching method is used to join the scenes - parallel processing.
With split-brain, it is likely that the stitching method is lost, and when interpreting (speech is mostly in the left brain), only the right-side scene is visible. This means that when a split brain is asked to focus on your nose, and describe the scene, they will describe only the right half of your face.
But how does one react? You'd imagine an individual to come out of surgery after their corpus callosum is severred to have a fit, "I'm blind in one eye!", but that's not the case. Relatively, it makes sense - since that is the duty of the left/right brain duo. A component was knocked out (the corpus callosum), and the computing still ticks along, realising there's some damage in the cables and promptly picking up tricks and compensation mechanisms.
For now I will leave this idea here, with a few final words.
Take this with a huge grain of salt, I'm just as prone to bias but I have the pleasure (or curse) of realising this. Narratives are a powerful way to tell a story, and I have used them in places here to extend on points.
It also goes without saying that the history of neuroscience, science in general, and life, comes with changes and realised errors when allowing for time. I expect almost all of these ideas to end up being hyper-simplified Platonized concepts in retrospect, conjoured-up between periods of uncertainty and inference with the study of the brain - that is the greatest caveat provied from this book.
My aim is uncertain at this time, but that's what I enjoy.