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...
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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.
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no subject
Date: 2007-01-24 12:07 am (UTC)Strauss, E. (1998, May). Writing, speech separated in split brain. Science pgs. 280-287
Sperry, R. (1992). Some effects of disconnecting the cerebral hemispheres. Science. vol. 217, pgs 1223-6.
Baynes, K., Elisassenk, JC. Lutsep, HL & Gazzaniga, MS (1998, May). Modular organization of cognitive sysems marked by interhemispheric integration. Science, vol 280, pgs 902-905
Hope that helps. I believe there is also a recent article (ummm New York Times? or Psychology Today?) that discusses brain operations and the renewal of severing the CC for severe epilepsy. What they are doing now is not a complete cut, but a partial cut maintaining some pathway in the back I believe.