The real cognitive neuroscience behind ‘cutting’

This article is Republished from Conversation under a Creative Commons license.

to cutwhich imagines a world in which a person’s work and personal lives are surgically separated, returns Friday for its long-awaited second season. While the concept of this fascinating piece of science fiction is far-fetched, it does touch on a question that neuroscience has been trying to answer for decades: Can a person’s mind really be split in two?

It is striking that there are “split brain” patients. Since the 1940s. To control the symptoms of epilepsy, these patients underwent surgery to separate the right and left hemispheres. Similar surgeries It still happens today.

Later search This type of surgery showed that the separate hemispheres in split-brain patients could process information independently. This raises the uncomfortable possibility that the procedure could create two separate minds living in one brain.

In the first season of to cutHailey R. (Brett Lauer) faced a conflict between her “inside” (the side of her mind that remembered her work life) and her “outside” (the side outside of work). Similarly, There is evidence Conflict between the hemispheres of true split-brain patients.

When speaking with split-brain patients, you usually communicate with the left hemisphere, which controls speech. However, some patients can communicate from the right hemisphere by writing, for example, or by arranging Scrabble letters.

Young patient In one study He was asked what job he would like in the future. The left hemisphere chose an office job of drawing technical drawings. However, his right brain arranged the letters to spell “car racer.”

Split-brain patients have also reported “Alien hand syndrome“, where one of their hands is perceived to move of its own volition. These observations suggest that two separate conscious “personas” may coexist in a single brain and may have conflicting goals.

in to cutHowever, both innie and outie have access to speech. This is an indication that the imaginary “separation procedure” must involve a more complex separation of brain networks.

An example of complex function separation is described in Neil’s case reportin 1994. Neil was a teenage boy experiencing a number of difficulties after developing a pineal gland tumor. One of these difficulties was a rare form of amnesia. This meant that Neil was unable to remember the events of his day or report on what he had learned at school. He was also unable to read, even though he could write, and he was no longer able to name things, even though he could draw them.

Surprisingly, Neil was able to keep up with his education. Researchers became interested in how he was able to complete his schoolwork despite not remembering what he was learning. They asked him about a novel he was studying in school. Apple juice with rosé By Lori Lee. During the conversation, Neil couldn’t remember anything about the book, not even the title. But when a researcher asked Neil to write down everything he could remember about the book, he wrote “blood-stained geranium window juice with rosy deranium smelling of wet pepper (sic) and mushroom growth” – all words connected to the novel. Since Neil couldn’t read, he had to ask the researcher: “What did you write?”