Introducing the brain: split brain, one mind (Introduction)

by David Turell , Wednesday, September 18, 2024, 00:01 (66 days ago) @ David Turell

Proven by research:

https://evolutionnews.org/2024/09/split-brain-research-confirms-unity-of-the-human-mind/

"As noted in the mini-documentary, in cases of intractable epilepsy, neurosurgeons may split the patient’s brain in half. That is, they sever the corpus callosum that joins the right and left brains. That prevents a seizure from raging across the whole brain.

"Usually, the patient will recover and go back to a mostly normal life, with fewer destructive seizures. There are not two minds going separate ways.

***

"Stony Brook University neurosurgeon Michael Egnor, who has done the split brain procedure, says,

“'What I have seen with these patients — and I’ve dealt with quite a few of them — and what [Roger] Sperry saw also, is that these are, for all intents and purposes, completely normal people. You meet these people, sit down and talk with them. They’re not two people. They certainly don’t think they’re two people. They have very subtle perceptual disabilities of the sort we talked about. But they don’t even notice them.”

"Why doesn’t the split-brain patient usually notice the disability much in everyday life? The patient’s single mind compensates for it easily. As Dr. Egnor notes, people with split brains unconsciously present objects to the correct hemisphere by simple, automatic movements.

"The Nobel Prize-winning experiments by Roger Sperry, which first identified the split-brain patients’ perceptual handicap, explicitly prevented his subjects from using their usual fixes. That — not the exotic phenomena that we might expect from two separate minds trapped in a single brain — is how the disability was first discovered.

"Egnor stresses that the persistence of normal behavior even when the brain is split is evidence for the unity of the human mind: “ … material things can always be divided into parts. That is, I can take a loaf of bread and cut it any which way you choose. So with material things, you can always make two out of one. But it’s very difficult to see how immaterial things like spirits or souls can be split in two.”

"Unity of the mind implies the actual existence of the mind, a concept that many fashionable neuroscientists would very much like to refute. Hence the preference for exotic explanations like “two separated minds … inside of a skull,” that are based on pretty flimsy evidence.

"Neuroscientist Yair Pinto and colleagues, who reviewed decades of split-brain research, concluded in 2017 that split-brain patients have split perception but unified consciousness."

Comment: As shown in NDE's the mind/consciousness is separate from the brain. The split brain findings are no surprise.