What? After all the naturalist pop psych lectures we paid good money for at the U? Well, suckers r’ us.
From Medical News Today:
A new research study contradicts the established view that so-called split-brain patients have a split consciousness. Instead, the researchers behind the study, led by UvA psychologist Yair Pinto, have found strong evidence showing that despite being characterised by little to no communication between the right and left brain hemispheres, split brain does not cause two independent conscious perceivers in one brain. Their results are published in the latest edition of the journal Brain.
Split brain is a lay term to describe the result of a corpus callosotomy, a surgical procedure first performed in the 1940s to alleviate severe epilepsy among patients. During this procedure, the corpus callosum, a bundle of neural fibres connecting the left and right cerebral hemispheres, is severed to prevent the spread of epileptic activity between the two brain halves. While mostly successful in relieving epilepsy, the procedure also virtually eliminates all communication between the cerebral hemispheres, thereby resulting in a ‘split brain’.
This condition was made famous by the work of Nobel laureate Roger Sperry and Michael Gazzaniga. In their canonical work, Sperry and Gazzaniga discovered that split-brain patients can only respond to stimuli in the right visual field with their right hand and vice versa. This was taken as evidence that severing the corpus callosum causes each hemisphere to gain its own consciousness.
For their study, Pinto and his fellow researchers conducted a series of tests on two patients who had undergone a full callosotomy. In one of the tests, the patients were placed in front of a screen and shown various objects displayed in several locations. The patients were then asked to confirm whether an object appeared and to indicate its location. In another test, they had to correctly name the object they had seen, a notorious difficulty among spit-brain patients.
…
To the researchers’ surprise, the patients were able to respond to stimuli throughout the entire visual field with all the response types: left hand, right hand and verbally. Pinto: ‘The patients could accurately indicate whether an object was present in the left visual field and pinpoint its location, even when they responded with the right hand or verbally. This despite the fact that their cerebral hemispheres can hardly communicate with each other and do so at perhaps 1 bit per second, which is less than a normal conversation. I was so surprised that I decide repeat the experiments several more times with all types of control.’
According to Pinto, the results present clear evidence for unity of consciousness in split-brain patients. ‘The established view of split-brain patients implies that physical connections transmitting massive amounts of information are indispensable for unified consciousness, i.e. one conscious agent in one brain. Our findings, however, reveal that although the two hemispheres are completely insulated from each other, the brain as a whole is still able to produce only one conscious agent. This directly contradicts current orthodoxy and highlights the complexity of unified consciousness.’ Paper. (paywall) – Split brain: divided perception but undivided consciousness Yair Pinto David A. Neville Marte Otten Paul M. Corballis Victor A. F. Lamme Edward H. F de Haan Nicoletta Foschi Mara Fabri More.
One awaits replication with great interest. In the meantime, who decided that the connections for consciousness had to be material anyway? Perceptronium man and New Scientist? Oh well then, that settles it.
See also: Seven myths of social psychology
and
What great physicists have said about immateriality and consciousness
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Maybe not this after all:
News, you find some really nice studies. Thank you.
I think this study adds significant weight to the contention that the two hemispheres of the brain must be quantum entangled in order to explain instantaneous synchronization between the two hemispheres:
The following paper appeals to a ‘non-local’, (i.e. beyond space and time), cause to try to explain the synchronization in neural circuits,,,
Moreover, when we sleep the non-local, beyond space and time, coherence displayed by the waking brain disappears.
At about the 21:45 minute mark of the following video, an interesting experiment on the sleeping brain is highlighted in which it is demonstrated that there is a fairly profound difference in in the way the brain ‘shares information’ between different parts of the brain in its sleeping state compared to how the brain ‘shares information’ in its waking state. i.e. In the sleeping state, the brain shares much less information with different parts of the brain than the brain does during our waking state.
Further notes:
Denyse,
Very interesting article. Thank you.
The first paragraph couldn’t be written better for introducing the topic. It made me laugh out loud.
Denyse:
Very interesting paper.
Of course, it is further evidence that the subject of perception is unique, and in no way it can be explained by physical arrangements of many complex parts.
The brain is a machine. A wonderful, incredible machine, but a machine just the same. It is designed to be an interface for the perceiving I.
And, of course, BA is perfectly right: the interface can only work at quantum level, or at even deeper levels that we cannot yet understand.
Of related note to this surprising result for split brains is the surprising result found for hemispherectomies:
Although atheistic materialists hold that we are not really real persons, as we take ourselves to be every waking moment of our lives, but are merely ‘neuronal illusions’,,,
Although atheistic materialists hold that we are not real persons but are merely illusions of our brain, hemespherectomies contradict this claim by atheists.
If a person were merely the brain, as materialists hold, then if half of a brain were removed then a ‘person’ should only be ‘half the person’, or at least somewhat less of a ‘person’, as they were before. But that is not the case, the ‘whole person’ stays intact even though the brain suffers severe impairment:
It is interesting how core claims by atheists are always upset by empirical findings.
If atheists were truly scientific in their concerns then they would soon change their mind and become Theists of some sort.
There must be something other than science that is in play for most atheists that prevents them from being honest to the evidence and changing their beliefs.
Bornagain 77 wrote
So true!
-Q
Here is Coyne’s original quote to Douthat:
Of related note: