Looks like we ’re going to have to re-write the textbooks on split-brain patients

Figure from Pinto et al 2017, via ResearchGate By Christian Jarrett Back in the 1960s, Nobel-prize winning research shook our understanding of what it means to be a conscious entity. Epilepsy patients who’d had the thick bundle of nerves connecting their two brain hemispheres either severed or removed (as a drastic treatment for their epilepsy) responded in laboratory tasks as if they had two separate minds. It’s an unsettling idea that has appeared in psychology textbooks for decades. But dig into the original studies and you’ll find the evidence for split brains leading to split minds was mostly descriptive. Now a team of researchers led by Yair Pinto at the University of Amsterdam has conducted systematic testing of two split-brain patients over several years, specifically to find out whether the division of their brains has also separated their consciousness. In fact, the results, published recently in the journal Brain, suggest their consciousness remains unified. It may be time to rewrite the textbooks. To understand the original observations and the new results, it helps to revisit a little basic neurobiology. There’s a lot of cross-wiring in the brain (the formal term is decussation), which means that the left side of space is processed by the brain’s right hemisphere and the right side of space is processed by the left hemisphere, which in most people is also the hemisphere that controls speech. Similarly, the left arm is controlle...
Source: BPS RESEARCH DIGEST - Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Tags: Brain Perception Textbooks Source Type: blogs