Reality Blind - Vol. 1

controls half the body, each independent “half” mind has the illusion of being a “whole” mind and believes it .

Here is an example: a patient with his corpus callosum severed was shown two large pictures – 1) in front of the left eye – some snow – 2) in front of the right eye, a picture of a bird’s foot (unlike the picture below, there was a separator between eyes so each eye could only see the picture presented to it.) Beneath each image was a series of smaller images, only one of which was related to the image above. When asked to point to the picture below that was linked to the bird’s foot,

the right hand (left brain) correctly pointed to an image of a chicken. Similarly, the left hand (right brain) correctly chose an image of a shovel to relate to the larger snow image. Because the left hemisphere is the center of verbal communication, when the subject was asked to explain the decisions, the subject offered the right hand’s (left brain) obvious explanation linking its own choice of a chicken to a bird’s foot. 44 However, when asked why the left hand (right brain) had chosen the shovel (for the snow scene), the left brain replied that the shovel had been selected for cleaning out the chicken shed! Though our brains are not privy to their own internal workings, the left brain -if it were honest - should have admitted it did not know why the right brain chose the shovel because it had never seen the snow scene – but instead it fabricated an answer to fit its own part of the story. Moreover, the left brain didn’t know it was bullshitting ; it immediately believed this confabulated explanation. Though most of us fortunately still have our corpus callosa intact, modern brain research is convincingly suggestive that the socially conforming and editing power of our left brains is formidable -

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