Help me, brain-science LJ!
Jan. 23rd, 2007 03:05 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
drwexI know I had this conversation not long ago, but I can't remember who I had it with...
![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
bluegargantua linked to this Time article on consciousness. In it, the author Steven Pinker references a series of at-the-time startling results from surgery on the corpus callosum. In short, the surgery was used for a brief time in history on patients with severe epilepsy. These days we have 'better' drugs and don't generally go about whacking apart large parts of peoples' brains because we can't figure out what else to do.
Anyway, the startling bit about this was that post-operative study of these patients revealed that our experience of unitary consciousness was, well, an illusion. In particular, people whose brain halves had been split from each other demonstrated that each half had a complete and coherent consciousness, often with a radically different personality than the commonly experienced consciousness. When I was an undergrad I remember reading, for example, about one of these patients whose dominant brain still loved his fiancee but when the other half was queried (*) it was found that this personality HATED the woman.
Problem: I can't find the original research reporting results on the split personality patients. I first read it on paper now long gone from my possession. Searching online has been fruitless. Even specialized sources like Google Scholar are just chock full of things I don't want. Pinker, of course, doesn't reference original source - he's not doing a scholarly publication after all. It's just accepted fact for people who study consciousness and yet virtually unknown to the general public.
So... HELP! I want to find and re-read these original studies, and I'm completely failing.
(*) It turns out you have to do some tricks to query the non-language half of the brain. Generally you cover one eye and communicate largely by pictures and pointing with the appropriate hand. If you let the patient use the other hand, the language/dominant personality tends to take over.
bluegargantua linked to this Time article on consciousness. In it, the author Steven Pinker references a series of at-the-time startling results from surgery on the corpus callosum. In short, the surgery was used for a brief time in history on patients with severe epilepsy. These days we have 'better' drugs and don't generally go about whacking apart large parts of peoples' brains because we can't figure out what else to do.Anyway, the startling bit about this was that post-operative study of these patients revealed that our experience of unitary consciousness was, well, an illusion. In particular, people whose brain halves had been split from each other demonstrated that each half had a complete and coherent consciousness, often with a radically different personality than the commonly experienced consciousness. When I was an undergrad I remember reading, for example, about one of these patients whose dominant brain still loved his fiancee but when the other half was queried (*) it was found that this personality HATED the woman.
Problem: I can't find the original research reporting results on the split personality patients. I first read it on paper now long gone from my possession. Searching online has been fruitless. Even specialized sources like Google Scholar are just chock full of things I don't want. Pinker, of course, doesn't reference original source - he's not doing a scholarly publication after all. It's just accepted fact for people who study consciousness and yet virtually unknown to the general public.
So... HELP! I want to find and re-read these original studies, and I'm completely failing.
(*) It turns out you have to do some tricks to query the non-language half of the brain. Generally you cover one eye and communicate largely by pictures and pointing with the appropriate hand. If you let the patient use the other hand, the language/dominant personality tends to take over.
no subject
Date: 2007-01-23 08:21 pm (UTC)Will say, though (from my own vague and uncited recollections of this research, back in the day) that while "our experience of unitary consciousness was, well, an illusion" strikes me as a very apt summary of the results, "each half had a complete and coherent consciousness" is a bit more troublesome a claim, though I understand where you're getting it from. It's one thing to demonstrate there isn't one-and-only-one "consciousness" in my brain... it's harder to demonstrate that there's exactly two, or anything else quite that neat.
Oh, and also:
These days we have 'better' drugs and don't generally go about whacking apart large parts of peoples' brains because we can't figure out what else to do.
You know, taken out of context, that sentence grows more entertaining with each rereading.
no subject
Date: 2007-01-23 09:32 pm (UTC)Right, and some of what interested me was the connection between this research and research into multiple personality disorder (back then called schizophrenia). The reason for picking the number two was that there were two personalities with which the researchers could reliably communicated. One had half the brain, one eye, one side of the body and the speech centers. The other had the other half.
taken out of context, that sentence grows more entertaining with each rereading.
Thank you, I spent some time constructing it for maximal entertainment value.