In 1990 British Airways 5390 suffered an explosive decompression when a cockpit window blew out due to improper maintenance. The force of the decompression partially pulled the captain out the window pinning him to the fuselage while his feet were caught on the control column. Thanks to the efforts of the first officer and flight attendants the plane was able to land safely around twenty minutes later. There were no fatalities.
If you split the connection between the left and right brain hemispheres as has been done to some people suffering from seizures you can then by using clever methods interview each side separate from the other and discover that they do not agree about most things.
What’s ever more interesting is that you can give tasks to one side and let the other side observe you do these tasks and when questioned it will come up with lies about why it did this despite this not being the actual reason.
Split brain experiments if you want to google more info.
They’re absolutely incredible and proof that we’re not singular people, but instead basically two people crammed into a single skull together forced to communicate.
We only have this data because the corpus callosum is easy to split, it needs to be done to treat some cases of epilepsy, and both hemispheres have nearly the same set of inputs and outputs. For all we know, you could separate out any other part of the brain and that section could be a whole person by itself.
We are a complex, interwoven system of decisions being made, most of which we don’t directly control. And we, the collective of that system, tell ourselves stories about who we are and why we do what we do.
My takeaway is not that instead of a single person we’re actually two but rather that self as we think about it doesn’t actually exist. It’s convenient for our lives to think about ourselves that way but I bet if you could actually understand the inner workings of brain and how matter gives rise to subjective experience you’d discover that there actually is no one in control. The only thing that makes us separate from the rest of the universe is that it feels like something to exist.
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