Theodore H. Schwartz at Psyche Magazine:
The brain consists of two mirror hemispheres, left and right, that communicate with one another through a thick fibre bundle called the corpus callosum. Back in the 1940s, a neurosurgeon named William P van Wagenen developed an operation where he severed the corpus callosum as a treatment for epilepsy. When his patients awoke, their seizures were improved. More remarkably, his patients were completely unaware that the two sides of their brains had been disconnected.
A few decades later, the neuropsychologists Roger Sperry and Michael Gazzaniga studied more of these so-called split-brain patients and discovered that each half of the brain processed information independently. Each could make its own decisions and control its own behaviours. In a sense, the surgery had created two separate selves.
more here.
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