The Unsettling Truth about Human Consciousness | The Split Brain experiment that broke neuroscience

In the 1939 neuroscientists began cutting living human brains in two in order to treat certain types of epileptic seizures. Subsequent experiments on those patients gave science an unnerving window into the nature of human consciousness. It turns out that there might be more versions inside of your own brain than you might be comfortable with.

CORRECTION: In this piece I stated each eye sent information to alternate hemispheres. This was not correct. Instead, as the diagram shows, the eyes divide the field of view into left and right sides and transmit each side to alternate hemispheres. The net effect is still the same as I explained in the video. Thanks to all the people who pointed out my error.

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Split brain behavioral experiments (Video of Joe)

Summary of Robert Sperry's Nobel Prize Winning Split Brain Experiments

One Brain. Two Minds? Many Questions

Interaction in isolation: 50 years of insights from split-brain research

The other side of the brain: The politics of split brain research in the 1970s-1980s

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[sgcarney]

CORRECTION: In this piece I stated each eye sent information to alternate hemispheres. This was not correct. Instead, as the diagram shows, the eyes divide the field of view into left and right sides and transmit each side to alternate hemispheres. The net effect is still the same as I explained in the video. Thanks to all the people who pointed out my error.

[grene]

About ten years ago I had a major heart attack. I flat lined and they had to jump start me. I very distinctly remember regaining consciousness. I could feel different parts of my various systems coming back on line. No, there were no near death experiences, it just felt like going to sleep. But when I started coming back on line, it definitely felt like a computer booting up. First I could see the faces of the doctors telling me to wake up, but I couldn't understand what they were saying. Then it started to make more sense, but I couldn't understand where I was and what was happening to me. It was like, what are these things? Oh, they're people. Why are they yelling at me? What does it mean? Oh wait...I think I'm starting to understand them... oh, that's right...I had a heart attack...they're helping me... It was a very strange experience.

[zacharysherry]

As an epileptic, I've experienced this understanding first hand (the hard way). When coming back from a strong seizure, some part of my brain is trying to hear, some part is just always talking, one part is trying to experiment to gather empirical evidence maybe by talking out loud... But then when one part that's confused about why what's coming out of my mouth is just jibberish, there's another part trying to calm the whole "self" down as the other part starts yelling "red flag! The voice isn't saying the right thing!" Even your smells become memories. Memories become "now". And as you slowly come back together, the memory is still there that you could feel all of the different pieces of the brain separately because they got quite a different juxtaposition from each other for that brief few seconds as the seizure was happening. It's really, really strange.

[diegomelgar]

I had brain damage seven years ago i was blind for a week and i couldn't recognize my family remember who i was or name things that i did know before like a cup a spoon things you learn as a kid
But months after that I heard on tv that the way your brain works can be reshape as you learn a new language so i did that by learning English and the translations of the words in Spanish i got my brain to find new ways to connect my memories and the knowledge i already had also was cool to learn a new language
Years after i found that even may way of being my self changed a lot usually i was really depressed and overstressed but now i feel more calm about everything and more creative
I love painting again and even if no one watch it i love creating new things
I hope that help someone too maybe there is a happier you there inside waiting

[davidhidalgoz.]

I had a concussion about 12 years ago. Chain of events led to me dying for some minutes. Thank god the doctors were able to bring me back. I don't remember anything about what happened. Just woke up 4 hours later, heard people talking, couldn't open my eyes or "wake up" for a while until I remembered I could wake up. Crazy stuff. People say I changed a lot, but I was only a child so I don't know if I agree. In any case is an unanimous opinion in my family.

[nyamutota]

Some people seem to miss the point that having different hemispheres of the brain perceiving different types of sensory data is not the same as multiple personalities.

[jackfgeorge]

Epilepsy Patient for 15+ years here. Last year hit my head while having a seizure. Ever since then, every time I have seizure, I find everything new. The first time, all roads appeared new and I felt like tourist and yet I knew the way. Super weird feeling. Adjusted to it. The latest one caused me to remember everything as it was 19 years ago when I was in school. Felt super weird seeing my family grown up and old. Yet there was a part of me rationally thinking knowing I just don't remember.
I have a infant daughter whom I love and yet I find her 4 month old photo extremely foreign.

[deadcelr]

I passed out once, and it felt like I just dozed off and woke up again in a matter of like 20 seconds, but it was actually about 20 minutes later. I distinctly remember bits and pieces of things coming back online, like I could see first, and then some amount of noticeable time after opening my eyes my hearing came back, and so on. But frustratingly, I struggled to come to terms with the passage of time and I didn't fully regain that ability for about 18 months. I had all the knowledge of time that anyone does, and I knew time was passing but I had no idea how to recognize it happening. It made work super annoying because I was just there, for an amount of time I couldn't reeeally quantify, and I relied heavily on checking clocks to understand how long I'd been anywhere (like when people check the time and go 'oh wow, I've been working on this report for 4 hours!' except it was like that for everything, minus the exclamation point because I started to see it coming). I think I just eventually got better and better at using other knowledge to ascertain time, like I knew an episode of my show was 22 minutes, so if I watched 2 episodes then I was on the couch for 44 minutes, or if I took note of the position of the sun in the sky I could guess that it had been an hour or two. I may have just completely relearned how to experience time. And I've come to the conclusion that time isn't real [in the sense that I used to think it was], it's essentially just the canvas that we lay down our interpretations on the chronology of events; it feels like something we've made up to help us understand sequence and I don't know what, but I think there's some deeper truth about time we haven't figured out yet.

[S]

As someone who was wrongly prescribed some very hardcore drugs for a problem I never had and then suffered immeasurable dependency and neological disruption as a result after extreme, and I mean extreme difficulty getting off them. I am experiencing my self and consciousness and my sensory input in a fractured and disrupted way, and the amazing thing is, I have insight into how my brain gives rise to experience itself and the oddities it creates when things are not functioning correctly, especially when it comes to visual processing and modelling the physical world.

[amarug]

The thing that's beyond me, is how did anyone ever think of "hm yeah let's just cut it" without thinking what kind of nightmarish consequences it may have for the poor person, even trumping any grand mal seizure. Luckily that didn't happen, but the idea of actually doing this also needed a pioneering surgeon who had some level of madness.

[Screcy]

If you put it this way it makes sense why people with amnesia generally don't lose their personality. In a way, losing their memories is equivalent to losing 1% of themselves. The memories did shape the rest of 99% over their life and built them over all as a person but losing the 1% itself does not affect what was already built.

[hory-portier]

This reminds me of my dyslexia. I say 'one' but my handwrites 'two' while thinking 'zero'
...and in reality the answer was 'a square hole' all along.

[laharlk]

i knew about this because one of my inner selves is the one that wakes me up in time when i ask him to wake me up the night before. Like just telling myself i need to wake up at 6am, i will regain consciousness around 5:55. It amazes me how well it can keep track of the time. All i need to give him is a look at the clock before bed so he knows his starting point. Works like clockwork.

[zafirodeagua]

I had my right temporal lobe removed in order to manage epileptic seizures. It has been by far the most difficult life experience to date. This information is very interesting to me, however, it does not reflect the same experiences I've had. Being a medical guinea pig has been a very, very unsettling trip that no one else seems to be able to relate to. I look normal on the exterior. I appear to be able to function in a somewhat reasonable fashion, however, for me life is nothing like I understood it to be before the surgery...

[LockeBerkebile]

Scott, Great piece. As one Buddhist rinpoche told me (paraphrasing from memory): “When we talk about caring for sentient beings, who are these beings? Realize that we contain within ourselves many sentient beings. We are composed of sentient beings. We can start by caring for these beings.”

[leonhayes]

Lifelong epileptic and diagnosed with grey matter heterotopia (which causes the seizures). I can tell you that my perception of "reality" is constantly in flux depending on the kind of seizure activity I'm experiencing. Thanks for this video.

[ericalopez]

Fascinating video! Really enjoyed watching this and the way you explained such a hard concept to grasp is incredible.

[HotShot-qygx]

So i once took a large dosage of psilocybin, and during the trip, i could feel my consciousness break down, and feel the different parts of my brain controlling things. I had one voice saying calm down, another voice saying lay down because that would feel nicer, another voice reminding me to breathe, and then i started panicking and all the voices in unison started telling me i was okay and to just keep breathing. What's weirder about that trip is at one point i wondered what death was, and a voice said "come with me" and i was shown what felt like true nothingness. It felt like i was just shut off from the rest of my brain for a minute. Just nothing existing. No thoughts, no awareness. And then i came back to the voices all telling me different things to do to calm myself down. Changed my life after that. Got all my shit together, got a job, got my own apartment. Felt like a whole different person after that.

[Welavish]

I study music and cognition, and in cognitive sciences, there's this field called 'embodied cognition' (first proposed by Antonio Varela and Maturana). One of the hypotheses about consciousness is that it is an emergent phenomenon. In other words, we cannot find a physical place where our consciousness resides. Instead, it is something that starts to exist thanks to the interaction of the many parts of our bodies (not just our brains) with each other and with our body's interaction with the environment.

[BrianDurstMusic]

My son was born missing his corpus callosum. This is definitely a need to watch video!