One is good, two is better: how the split-hemisphere brain works

[CarderPlanet]

Corpus publishes a book by neuroscientist Michael Gazzaniga “Stories from different hemispheres of the brain. Life in Neuroscience ”translated by Yulia Pliskina and Svetlana Yastrebova. Gazzaniga talks about the split brain, which he has been researching since the 1960s. After the separation, the right and left halves of the brain begin to function independently of each other - in fact, two independent minds arise in the head. We are publishing an excerpt from the chapter on how, more than half a century ago, they began to study the split brain in patients who underwent surgery on the corpus callosum.
Michael Gazzaniga (MG): Fix your gaze on a point.
WJ: You mean a little piece of paper stuck to the screen?
MG: Yes, this is the point ... Look directly at it.
WJ: Good.

I make sure it is looking directly at the point, and I display a simple object, the square to the right of the point, for exactly 100 milliseconds. An object located in this way is projected into the left, "speaking" hemisphere of the brain. This test developed by me with Akelaitis patients has not yet been performed.
M.G .: What did you see?
W.J .: Rectangle.
M.G .: Okay, let's try again. Fix your gaze on a point.
WJ: You mean a piece of paper?
M.G .: Yes, exactly. Look at him.

And again I display an image of a square on the screen, but this time to the left of the point at which the patient's gaze is fixed, and it falls only into the right hemisphere of the brain, which is not able to speak. Due to a special operation in which the connecting fibers between the hemispheres were dissected, WJ's right hemisphere could no longer communicate with the left. This was a defining moment. My heartbeat quickens, my mouth dries up when I ask:
M.G .: What did you see?
W.J .: Nothing.
M.G .: Nothing? Have you seen anything?
W.J .: Nothing.
The heart is pounding. I'm starting to sweat. Have I just seen two brains, or rather, two minds, working separately from each other in the same head? One could speak, the other could not. It happened, didn't it?
WJ: Would you like me to do something else?
M.G .: Yes, one moment.

I quickly find even simpler slides where only isolated small circles are projected onto the screen. Each slide shows only one circle, but it appears on the screen every time in a different place. What happens if the patient is simply asked to indicate what he sees?
MG: Just point your hand at what you see.
W.J .: On the screen?
MG: Yes, and with whatever hand you want.
WJ: Good.
MG: Fix your gaze on the point.

The circle is highlighted to the right of the point at which the gaze is fixed, which allows the patient's left hemisphere to see it. WJ's right hand rises off the table and points to where the circle was. We do this a few more times, with the circle appearing on one half of the screen, then on the other. Nothing changes. When the circle is to the right of the gaze fixation point, the right hand, controlled by the left hemisphere, points to it. When the circle is located to the left of the gaze fixation point, it is indicated by the left hand, controlled by the right hemisphere. One hand or the other correctly points to the right place on the screen. This means that each hemisphere actually sees a circle when it is in the opposite field of view, and each, apart from the other, can direct the hand it controls to respond to the stimulus. However, only the left hemisphere is able to say this. I can hardly contain myself. O sweetness of discovery!

This is how the line of research begins, which twenty years later, almost one day, will be awarded the Nobel Prize.
Choose any period in your life, in the events of which many people took part, and each of them will retell the story in its own way. I have six children, and the whole crowd comes home for the Christmas holidays. Hearing their memories of childhood, I am amazed at how differently the same events were captured in their memory. This is true for all of us when we recall events from our professional life. The factual side of scientific research was in the foreground, and what was happening in the background? Of course, that magical moment with W.J. happened not only because of the two of us.

The brave doctor and his voluntary patient
Joseph Bogen was a young neurosurgeon, bright and energetic, and he promoted the idea of performing brain splitting operations on humans. He convinced the head of the neurosurgery department, Peter Vogel, to perform the first modern brain splitting operations. Joe was a tireless intellectual with a special taste for life and helped to see the project from a valuable medical point of view. And he was also the one who found the first suitable patient. I could explain how it happened, but he himself will tell much better about it, remembering that patient and those early years. Patient W.J.'s revolutionary contribution is evident from the outset:
“I first met Bill Jenkins in the summer of 1960 when he was brought to intensive care in status epilepticus; I was on duty at the neurological department at that moment. In the months that followed, heterogeneity became apparent to me, coupled with drug resistance and the severity of his multifocal seizures. Both in the clinic and in the hospital, I witnessed psychomotor disorders, sudden drops in muscle tone and unilateral twitching, as well as generalized seizures. In late 1960, I wrote to Maitland Baldwin, then head of the NIH (National Institutes of Health) neurosurgery department in Bethesda, Maryland. A few months later, Bill was transferred to the NIH Epileptology Center, where he spent six weeks. He was sent home in the spring of 1961, told that there was no effective treatment for his case.
Then Bill and his wife Fern were told about the results of the work of Van Wagenen [the neurosurgeon who first dissected the corpus callosum of a person in the 1940s. - Approx. Ed.], mainly with partial dissection of the brain commissures. I suggested that a complete dissection would help. Their enthusiasm inspired me to turn to Phil (my boss): he had extensive experience in the removal of arteriovenous malformations of the corpus callosum. He suggested that we practice in the morgue five or six times. By the end of the summer (during which I again worked as a neurosurgeon), we confidently mastered the technique of the operation. In conversations with Sperry, I emphasized that this is a unique opportunity to test the results of his experiments with cats and monkeys in humans and that his line of research was extremely important. He mentioned that a student, who is about to graduate from Dartmouth College, spent the previous summer in the laboratory and would be delighted to test a person. Mike Gazzaniga began his graduate work in September and, Sperry said, was eager to test a human test subject. We soon became friends and began to plan experiments together.

cops to be done before and after the operation. There was a short delay before her, during which Bill was tested in Sperry's lab. During this delay, we also had the opportunity to document Bill's multiple seizures in sufficient detail and detail.

It was during the preoperative testing period when Bill said, "You know, even if the operation does not help to relieve my seizures, but you will learn something new from it, it will be more beneficial than anything I have done in years."
He was operated on in February 1962. In retrospect, I think that if there had been a research committee in our hospital at that time, the approval of its members would have been required for any procedure, this operation would never have been done. At that time, the head of the department alone could make such a decision, which, I believe, was similar to the situation at the University of Rochester in the late 1930s. "

Science then and now
Then, in 1961, life was simple. Or so it seems now. It was a time when people would go to college, study hard, go to graduate school or graduate school, get an advanced degree, become postdocs, take a paid position, then become professors at some institute. They lived their lives pursuing their intellectual interests. Today, career paths are not so clearly defined and more and more postdocs are leaving for industry, educational activities, start-ups, foreign research organizations, and so on. Many have colleagues who have come from abroad or have spent some time there. This is all fine too, but it differs from the previous order and, in a social sense, is more complexly arranged.

In the early 1960s, some aspects of biology also seemed deceptively simple. Watson and Crick made their groundbreaking discovery of the structure of DNA and its role in heredity. By today's standards of molecular mechanisms, the model they built is simple. Genes produce proteins, and proteins then perform all kinds of bodily functions. One or two - and here you have a complete mechanism. It became known as the Central Dogma. Information moved in one direction - from DNA to proteins, which then gave instructions to the body. Today, however, there are already serious disagreements even about what to call a genome, and even more so about how many different interactions exist between molecules that are believed to be links in a certain causal chain. To further complicate the picture, we add, that information goes in both directions: what is generated, in turn, affects how it is formed. The molecular aspects of life reflect a complex system based on feedback loops and multiple interactions - there is nothing linear or simple about it.

In the early days of modern brain science, discussions were conducted in unpretentious terms. Neuron A sent a signal to neuron B, and that to neuron B. Information was transmitted along a chain and somehow gradually transformed from sensations from sensory systems into actions, under the influence of external reinforcements. Today, such a simplified description of how the brain works looks ridiculous. The interactions of various brain networks are as complex as the interactions of their constituent molecules. The construction of a scheme for their work is almost paralyzing in its complexity. It is good that we did not realize this then, otherwise no one would have dared to take on this work.

Looking back at those early years, I think that the study of the split brain in humans played into the hands of the most naive of the researchers - me. I didn't know anything.
I was just trying to figure out the problem using my own vocabulary and my own simple logic. That was all I had besides endless energy. Ironically, the same was true for Sperry, the most advanced neuroscientist of his era. He had never worked with humans as test subjects before, so we pushed our way forward together.

In a sense, of course, we all understood that split-brain patients are patients with neurological disorders, and neurology was already an established field with a rich vocabulary. Joe was our guide through the minefield of technical terms. Evaluation of a patient with a stroke or degenerative disease has been well established and accurately described. The rich history of the first neurologists has brought us a wealth of information about which part of the brain is responsible for which cognitive functions. The 19th century giants of the profession, Paul Broca and John Hughlings Jackson, and their 20th century counterparts such as the neurosurgeon Wilder Penfield and Norman Geschwind, have all played important roles in the development of the medical perspective on how the brain works.

I still remember the day Joe came to Caltech from White Memorial Hospital to give a workshop in our lab. He described our first results using classic neurological terminology. Although it was not gibberish, it sounded like that to me, and I remember telling Joe and Sperry about it. Joe was very open-minded and consistently progressive. He simply told me, “Okay, describe it better,” and Sperry nodded in agreement. In the years that followed, we did this by developing in our first four articles a dictionary of scientific terms to describe what happens to people who have had their halves of the brain split.

 

[Teacher]

Eight Subconscious Brain Errors

Salute, fans of fucking up someone else's account, here's an article about eight subconscious brain mistakes and how to avoid them.

Mistake 1: We surround ourselves with information that matches our beliefs

We prefer people who think like us. If we agree with someone's beliefs, we tend to get closer to them. Subconsciously, we begin to ignore everything that could potentially threaten our vision of the world. We surround ourselves with people and information that confirm what we already think.

This phenomenon is called "persuasion bias." If you've already heard of the frequency illusion, the two concepts are very similar. The illusion of frequency occurs when you buy a new car and suddenly see cars of the same model everywhere. Or when a pregnant woman suddenly notices other pregnant women everywhere. This is a passive perception — our brain is looking for information that is relevant to us, but we sincerely believe that the number of these coincidences has really increased.

We don't just do this with the information we perceive, we adjust our memories in the same way. In one experiment in 1979 at the University of Minnesota, participants read a story about a woman named Jane. In some situations, she behaved like an extrovert, in others like an introvert. After a few days, the participants were divided into two groups. One group was asked if Jane's job as a librarian was suitable, and the second group was offered the option of working as a real estate agent.

In 2009, a study in Ohio showed that we spend 36% more time reading an essay if its idea coincides with our opinion.

"Whenever your points of view or beliefs are closely intertwined with your perception of yourself, that you are unable to reject them without damaging key concepts of your self, and you avoid situations that could harm those beliefs." - David McRaney "Now you're less stupid"

Mistake 2: We believe in the "swimmer's body illusion"

This is one of my favorite misconceptions that I have encountered. In Rolf Dobelli's The Art of Clear Thinking, the author explains how much our ideas about talent and intense training are off course.

"Professional swimmers don't have perfect bodies because they train so hard. It is more accurate to say that they are good swimmers due to their constitution. The way their bodies are designed is a selection factor, not a result of physical activity."

swimmer's body illusion

The "swimmer's body illusion" occurs when we confuse selection factors with outcomes. Another good example is the most famous universities: are they really the best educational institutions, or do they select the best students who are good regardless of the influence of the institution itself on them?

Without this illusion, half of your ad campaigns won't work. If we didn't naively believe that we could achieve results in something, we would never buy products that promise to improve our performance in areas where we are unlikely to achieve outstanding success.

Mistake 3. We regret things that we've already lost.

The term "wasted cost" refers to any type of wasted cost (not necessarily in monetary terms, but also in terms of time and effort). The reason we pay so much attention to spending, even though it's already paid for, is because we're programmed to feel losses more strongly than gains. Psychologist Daniel Kanneman explains this in his book Thinking Fast and Slow: "Living things that showed greater urgency in situations of danger avoidance were more likely to pass on their genes to their offspring.

Hal Arks and Katrin Blamer conducted an experiment in 1985 that demonstrated our tendency to think irrationally when faced with a situation with erroneous costs. They asked participants to imagine that they spent $100 on a ticket to a ski resort in Michigan, but soon after found a better resort in Wisconsin for $50 and bought a ticket to that resort, too. Afterward, the participants were asked to imagine that the two trips coincided in time with each other and that the tickets could not be refunded or resold.

The fallacy of lost costs causes us to lose sight of existing logical arguments and make irrational decisions based on our emotions — even without realizing that we are doing it.

What we don't understand is that the best choice is one that promises a better experience in the future, rather than one that reduces the sense of loss in the past.

This is a subconscious reaction that is difficult to avoid. You need to try to separate the current factors from what has already happened in the past. For example, if you bought a movie ticket and found out that the movie is terrible, you can:

a) stay and finish watching the movie to justify the money spent (the fallacy of lost expenses).

b) leave the movie theater and spend time doing something you really enjoy

Here's one thing to keep in mind: you can't return these attachments. They're gone. Do not let this fact cloud your judgment when making decisions at this moment — let the losses remain in the past.

Mistake 4. We incorrectly predict the probability of events.

Imagine playing Heads or Tails with your friends. You flip the coin again and again, each time trying to guess whether it's heads or tails. According to the theory of probability, every time your chances are 50/50 in favor of the fact that you will answer correctly.

Now imagine that you flipped a coin five times in a row and each time you got an eagle. Next time it's tails, isn't it? The probability of this happening increases, right?

gambling addiction

But it's not. The probability of getting tails is 50/50. Every time. Even if the eagle fell twenty times in a row. The probability doesn't change. The "gambler's error" is a failure in our thinking — we are once again proving our irrational nature. The problem is that we attach too much importance to events that have already occurred, believing that they can affect the outcome of the situation in the future.

Gamblers are affected by a similar thinking error — a systematic error of positive expectations. This is when we mistakenly think that in the end, luck will turn to us. We don't want to accept defeat and give up, and we often continue to play until we get a positive result, regardless of what the chances are that this will actually happen.

Error 5. We make decisions based on the anchor effect

Dan Ariely, a behavioral economist, presented one of my favorite TED Talks (a show on the website of TED, a nonprofit organization focused on spreading the reasonable-kind-eternal on the web) about the irrationality of the human brain.

In his speech, he demonstrated this error of thinking on a large number of examples. The anchor effect works as follows: instead of making a decision based on the absolute value of the investment (time, money, etc.), we focus on the comparative value — that is, the one that our choice represents in comparison with other possible choices.

Let's take a look at some of Dan's examples to demonstrate this example in practice:

One example is an experiment that Dan conducted using 2 types of chocolate at a kiosk sale: Hershey's Kisses and Lindt Truffles. The Kisses cost 1 cent apiece, while the Truffles sold for 15 cents each. Taking into account the difference in the quality of chocolate and the usual price for each of them, the price of Lindt Truffles was very favorable and most visitors to the kiosk bought Lindt Truffles.

At the next stage of his experiment, Dan offered a choice of the same product, but at the same time reducing the price by 1 cent for each type of chocolate. So Kisses were now free, and Lindt Truffles cost 14 cents apiece. Obviously, Lindt Truffles were now an even better buy considering their regular price, but since Kisses were now free, most chose them!

"Our loss aversion system is constantly awake, on standby, to keep us from spending more than we can afford. Thus, we always calculate the difference between the cost and the possible loss, " - quote from You Are Not So Smart

Another example that Dan gives in his TED talk concerns the case when customers are given several gift promotions. It is suggested to choose between a trip to Rome and a similar trip to Paris, and in both cases all costs are included — it is very difficult to make a choice. Each city offers its own special cuisine, culture and travel experience - and the client should choose one of them.

Then a third alternative was added — an exact copy of the trip to Rome, but without the coffee included in breakfast. And everything changed. When customers saw that they would have to pay 2.50 euros for coffee in the third case, then a trip to Rome with coffee included in the breakfast price became more attractive compared not only to the third alternative, but also compared to a trip to Paris too. Although before the third case was announced, customers did not even think about whether the coffee was turned on or not.

Here's another even better example from Dan's experiments:

Dan found this real-life ad offer from The Economist and used it to show how seemingly meaningless choices (like Rome without coffee) affect our decisions.

In the beginning, three alternatives were offered: a subscription to The Economist web version for $59, a print version for $125, or a subscription to the print and web versions for $125. It is quite obvious which of the alternatives is clearly useless here. When Dan handed out the subscription form to one hundred MIT students and asked them which option they would choose, 84% chose the combined $125 offer. 16% chose the lower-cost web version of the subscription, and no one chose the $125 print version.

Next, Dan removed the "useless" print version that no one wanted to subscribe to and conducted this experiment with another group of a hundred MTU students. This time, the majority chose the lower-cost web version of the subscription, and a minority chose the combined version. So, even though no one wanted to sign up for the $125 print version of the subscription, it wasn't really worthless — in fact, it tilted the decisions of people making a choice between the two alternatives in favor of the combined version, making that choice more meaningful in comparison.

This error is called the "anchor effect", because we tend to focus on a particular value and compare it with other options, seeing the difference between the values; instead of calculating the value of each option individually.

Self-elimination of meaningless options can help us make more logical decisions.

On the other hand, Dan says that a big part of the problem is that we don't know enough about our own preferences, so maybe that's what we should focus on first.

Mistake 6. We logically justify purchases that we don't need

How many times have you returned home from a shopping trip dissatisfied with your purchase decisions and started to convince yourself that they were necessary? Maybe you didn't want to buy it at all or previously thought it was expensive. It may not have been exactly what you wanted to buy.

Nevertheless, we can quite convincingly prove to ourselves that these cheap, unnecessary and poorly thought-out purchases are necessary for us. This phenomenon is known as post-purchase rationalization or "Stockholm Buyer Syndrome".

The reason we're so good at it goes back to psychology:

Social psychologists believe that post-purchase rationalization arises from our inner desire to stay consistent and avoid cognitive dissonance.

Cognitive dissonance is the discomfort we feel when we try to adhere to two different ideas or theories.

For example, we consider ourselves a person who treats strangers kindly. Once on the street we see a fallen person and do not stop to help him — this situation will cause us conflict: on the one hand, we are friendly to strangers, and on the other hand, we did not help a stranger who fell in front of us. This creates so much discomfort that we will choose to change our judgment to justify our actions — that is, we begin to think of ourselves as someone who is not friendly to strangers, as this is confirmed by our actions.

So, in the case of impulsive shopping, we need to logically justify our purchases until we actually believe that we just needed to buy it all. In this way, our self-image will not run counter to our actions (making purchases).

The difficulty of getting rid of this error is that we often act first, and then logically comprehend our actions.

If we know about this error, we can anticipate the event before performing the action. For example, when making a purchase decision, we often know that we will justify it to ourselves later. If we can admit it, we can avoid it. But I warn you — this is not easy to get rid of!

Mistake 7. We believe our memories more than our facts.

Our memories are very plastic and often wrong. And yet, we subconsciously tend to believe them more than the facts. The "accessibility heuristic" is a good example of this. It all works like this:

Let's say that you are reading a certain text and you are asked which words have the most words on the page: words with the ending " - ing "or words with the penultimate letter"n". It is clear that it is impossible to have more "ing"endings than words with the penultimate letter" n " (it took me some time to understand this fact — read the sentence again carefully if it didn't work out right away).

We base our answer about the probability (that there are more words with the ending "ing" in the text on the page) on how accessible the relevant examples are (i.e., how easily we can select them). Our efforts to find words with the penultimate letter " n " make us think that such words are not so common, and we subconsciously ignore the obvious facts.

Despite the fact that the "availability heuristic" is a natural process of our thinking, scientific experiments have revealed a pattern: statistics will always exceed the "availability heuristic". That is, in simple terms, when trying to evaluate statistics intuitively, or by eye, we almost always make mistakes!

What can we learn from this? Always focus on the facts whenever possible. Study the data. Don't base your specific decisions on your gut feelings without at least first examining the data objectively.

Mistake 8. We are more affected by stereotypes than we realize.

An interesting feature of most of these errors of thinking is that they are so deeply rooted that I had to think for a long time about why they are errors at all! This is a good example in itself — I thought for a long time before realizing how illogical this model of thinking is.

Human consciousness is so inextricably linked to stereotypes and so confused by clear explanations that it will cling to stereotypes even if they contradict logic.

An example to demonstrate this error is from research by Daniel Kanneman and Amos Tversky:

In 1983, Kanneman and Tversky tested how illogical human thinking can be by describing a fictional personality.:

Linda is a 31-year-old woman, single, sincere and very smart. She majored in philosophy. As a student, she studied discrimination and social law in depth, and participated in demonstrations against the use of atomic energy.

The researchers asked people to read this description and then answer the following questions::

Which alternative is most likely?

1. Linda is a great joke-teller.
2. Linda is an excellent storyteller and an active participant in the feminist movement.

Here's what's a little hard to understand (at least for me) — if answer two is correct, then answer one is automatically correct too. This means that the second answer cannot be an answer to the probability question.

Alas, few of us understand this, as we are covered by a more detailed description of the second point. Moreover, since the previous version is already indicated, the stereotypes are so deeply embedded in our consciousness that we unconsciously apply them to the rest of the items.

About 85% of people choose point 2 as the answer!

Again, here we see how irrational and illogical we can be, even when the facts are outwardly obvious.

I really like this quote from Daniel Kanneman's research on the differences between economics and philosophy:

"I was amazed. My fellow economists worked in the building next door, but I didn't realize how deep the difference between our intellectual worlds was. For psychologists, it is a matter of course that people are neither completely rational nor completely selfish, and therefore their tendencies can be anything but permanent."

Of course, it's normal for people to be irrational and think illogically, even though we rarely understand it. But with these pitfalls in mind, which we often fall into when making decisions, we can at least recognize them, if not avoid them.