| Ken,
Unfortunately, you have done some first class thinking on the basis of
a whole series of misconceptions which have been fed you by a pop psych
press which is more concerned with presenting simplistic messages than
even vaguely accurate ones.
Sperry's patients were, quite literally, brain damaged. That the brain
can compensate for that extensive damage by developing two more or less
independent personalities is truly amazing -- but it is not what is
going on in "normal" people. That the personalities which developed
each had certain distinct cognitive deficits provides subtle clues to
the way that cognition ties into the physical "architecture" of the
brain. But it is simply not *directly* relevant to undamaged brains.
Familiar tasks such as thinking, reading, speaking, understanding
speech, moving, etc., are done by coordinating the activities of a
number of lower-level processes. These lower-level processes
frequently have specialized areas of the brain where they take place.
Some of these specialized areas are on the left side and some are on
the right. There are, for example, *multiple* speech centers both on
the right and left brain-hemispheres. Speech in normal human beings
involves all of those centers.
The right brain is not mute, any more than your soft palette is "mute".
In normal human beings the right brain is an important and active
component in the production of speech. In people with the
corpus-collosum severed, however, it is blocked from access to some
critical, uncompensatable pieces of cognitive machinery necessary to
utter speech, and so it *becomes* mute as a result of that brain
damage.
The right side and left side are not separate people. You are both of
them working together, just like you are the front and back of your
brains working together. The right doesn't *help* you-in-the-left, it
simply is *you*.
You don't have to communicate with your right brain; you *are* your
right brain. It has no existence independent of you; it has no
thoughts independent of your thoughts -- unless you have had your brain
split surgically.
Facile descriptions of the right brain as "intuitive" and the left
brain as "analytic" have some validity, but shouldn't be taken too far
(as they almost universally are). Those descriptions are a loose and
only partially accurate way of summarizing the difference on the
average in the functions of the various specialized brain centers on
the two sides. But both high-level "intuitive" and "analytic" thinking
requires both sides of the brain just about equally.
People trying to sell techniques for tapping intuition make themselves
sound more "scientific" by saying that they are tapping the "potential
of the right brain" or some such sales spiel. They might as well say
"Now with cleanorresorcibite-7 for a whiter than white wash". I'm all
for people learning to use their intuition better (and even more their
analytic powers better -- most people seem to depend principally *on*
their intuition without particularly knowing how to use it), but this
sense of "intuition" has almost nothing to do with left/right brain
dichotomies.
I don't know of *anything* by the way, that justifies calling the right
brain more "creative" than the left -- that is just part of the sales
pitch of those whose line is that "you" are your left brain and are cut
off from the "creative" right side and they can help you "get in touch
with it". Creativity is a high level function which almost certainly
involves both sides of the brain, and, independently of that, both high
level "analytic" and "intuitive" thinking.
A better term than "intuitive" for summarizing right brain functions --
the proper antonym for "analytic" -- is "synthetic", except that has
taken on some completely inappropriate connotations. "Holistic"
suffers from a similar problem -- it has come to mean simply "good".
Centers in the right brain *tend* to see the forest but not the trees,
while centers in the left brain *tend* to see the trees but not the
forest. Only by working together, moving a task back and forth between
them, do they get the benefits of both views.
As for some of your other points --
People with severe cognitive deficits try to function normally in a
normal world by compensating for and rationalizing away their deficits.
Read The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat for many examples. I don't
know any reason to suppose that this function is peculiar to the left
brain. I rather suspect that given the correct circumstances the left
brain personality of a split brain patient would be just as quick to
rationalize.
I do not hypothesize that the Ouija board operates through unconscious
movements. That is a well established scientific theory which was
proven pretty conclusively by Michael Faraday (among others) well over
one hundred years ago. What I do hypothesize, without much conviction,
is that once in a great while, the Ouija board operates under different
mechanisms, though to the best of my knowledge this has never been
observed under controlled conditions which provide any strong reason to
believe it.
I am quite sure that the "right brain is the seat for at least part of
our subconscious". The rest of it is in the left brain. Everything
that I said before about cognitive processes existing via coordination
between the left and right brain applies to the whole "mind" --
conscious and subconscious. Your hypothesis is a reasonable one given
the misconceptions which you have been flooded with. The inappropriate
sense of the word "intuitive" which the "learn to use your right brain"
promoters have been pushing, refers to subconscious reasoning -- both
analytic and holistic. Twenty years ago they would have been saying,
with more accuracy, "learn to tap the potentials of your subconscious".
But today the subconscious is "out" and the "right brain" is in, so
they ascribe its properties to the right brain, leaving your
consciousness sitting isolated in the left.
You yourself, by the way, provided an example of subconscious
functioning in a "left brain" personality. The rationalization of the
error is clearly a subconscious function. The patient was not just
"making up excuses" to cover up his/her embarrassment at being caught.
The patient was rationalizing their own behavior in terms to bring it
out of conflict with their own self-image of a "complete" individual in
control of themselves.
Singing uses somewhat different centers than normal speaking does. Some
of the differences are in the right brain, and some in the left. It
would seem that the neurological flaw that causes stuttering is (at
least frequently) in one of those centers side-stepped when singing.
Cursing has the same property for stutters, by the way, but this is
less useful for treatment. I think the "helps control breathing"
doctors are just those who object on principle to explaining stuttering
as anything but a "behavioral" problem. They seem unable to deal with
the fact that just controlling the breathing without the singing has
little effect, except through stress release.
The right brain in Sperry's experiments frequently communicated with
words -- it just had to write them, it couldn't get access to the
*vocal* mechanisms.
The subconscious, in any case, is *highly* verbal. Most of the
subtlety of our verbal behavior comes out of it. We do not generally,
consciously construct each sentence by scanning carefully through our
mental lexicons, choosing each word and plugging it in (if we did, we
would be conscious of the detailed mechanics of our languages grammar,
and the linguists wouldn't still be arguing over it). Rather, we think
of what we want to say and the right way of saying it pops into our
mind and out of our mouths -- supplied by the subconscious.
In any case, keep in mind that the Ouija only communicates with certain
"aspects" of our subconscious. There is a lot of room "down there."
Topher
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| RE: .3
It is quite certain that people can commit acts and not remember them
later -- or commit acts that they are not aware of as they do them.
Hypnosis provides a means by which this can be demonstrated pretty much
at will. I do not believe that temporary impairment of the corpus
callosum has much to do with it though. After all, the right brain
memories would become available to the left brain, and vice versa,
after recovery. This is a function of conscious vs subconscious rather
than left vs right brain. Furthermore, I do not think that impaired
memory of an event has much bearing on proper legal responsibility for
illegal acts. One is not responsible for illegal acts because of
"insanity" in the US if, at the time of the act, either you are
incapable of understanding that the act is "wrong", or you are utterly
incapable of not commiting the act. I think that that is a pretty fair
principle -- the problem being determining when it applies. As is
frequently the case in law, the only available solution is to depend on
the case by case judgement of the jury or presiding judge.
Topher
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