What’s your favorite interesting fact?
What’s your favorite interesting fact?
@taetaetoofs@lemmy.world was talking about tornadoes and it was really interesting, figured I’d see what other cool things we all know
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If you split the connection between the left and right brain hemispheres as has been done to some people suffering from seizures you can then by using clever methods interview each side separate from the other and discover that they do not agree about most things.
What's ever more interesting is that you can give tasks to one side and let the other side observe you do these tasks and when questioned it will come up with lies about why it did this despite this not being the actual reason.
Split brain experiments if you want to google more info.
They're absolutely incredible and proof that we're not singular people, but instead basically two people crammed into a single skull together forced to communicate.
My takeaway is not that instead of a single person we're actually two but rather that self as we think about it doesn't actually exist. It's convenient for our lives to think about ourselves that way but I bet if you could actually understand the inner workings of brain and how matter gives rise to subjective experience you'd discover that there actually is no one in control. The only thing that makes us separate from the rest of the universe is that it feels like something to exist.
This book digs deeper into that sort of stuff:
The Self Illusion: How the Social Brain Creates Identity https://a.co/d/fZhHVrG
Worth a read
We only have this data because the corpus callosum is easy to split, it needs to be done to treat some cases of epilepsy, and both hemispheres have nearly the same set of inputs and outputs. For all we know, you could separate out any other part of the brain and that section could be a whole person by itself.
We are a complex, interwoven system of decisions being made, most of which we don't directly control. And we, the collective of that system, tell ourselves stories about who we are and why we do what we do.
there are at least two minds in your brain, and they mostly disagree.