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split brains and split personalities

Roger Penrose talks about an experiment, reported by scientist Donald Wilson, with a split-brain patient (one w/ two hemispheres of their brain cut off from each other at the corpus collosum), in which both hemishperes learned to speak, but expressed different preferences (one side expressed the desire to be a draftsman, the other, to be a racing driver).

This is troubling, but not entirely

Certainly, if both hemispheres are generating two different expressions at the same time (I suppose that they would have to engage in handwriting rather than using the mouth at the same time), then the very concept of the unity of the soul becomes problematic or meaningless. But to express different preferences at different times would not be all that problematic, for it wouldn't be much different from the way we experience having even mutually inconsistent desires (to exercise, to diet, to work, to goof off, etc.) . A study of the brain as it expresses these desires might find that they originate from different parts of the brain operating in a very compartmentalized (hmm: this is the first time I noticed the "mental" in "comparmental") fashion--so compartmentalized that the connection between any two of these parts might as well have been physically severed.

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