One thing from the text and lecture in the past two weeks that I found extremely interesting is the idea of split-brain patients and their similarities and differences to people whose corpus callosums are still intact.
The idea is that split-brain surgery does not affect the intelligence of individuals, but does affect their conscious memory and communication skills. However, it seems that unconscious memory is left intact. This is likely due to the fact that both areas of speech and language comprehension (Broca's area and Wernike's area) are located on the left hemisphere of the brain, and if the two hemispheres are split, the right hemisphere has no way to communicate out loud. This finding is important in psychological research because it highlights a difference between unconscious thought and conscious thought, and brings up the idea that perhaps conscious thought is actually a result of our unconscious actions, not the other way around.
I was doing a little more research on this subject on my own the other day and found myself on YouTube, watching a few videos. This video in particular caught my attention, because it brings up some very interesting points and questions:
During lecture, we talked about how split-brain surgery affects an individual's conscious and unconscious thought, and how both hemispheres of the brain are separate because they have no way of communicating with each other. However, we never touched on any aspects of the hemispheres other than language, for example, personality or personal beliefs. How vast is the realm of the unconscious? How many things, in terms of personal beliefs, attitudes, and personalities, does the unconscious control? Are these things affected by splitting the two hemispheres of the brain? With these questions being pondered, one thing I am left wondering is if, once the two hemispheres of the brain are split, they are completely separate from each other, is it possible for multiple-personality disorder to result from split-brain surgery?
Leave a comment