Re:What happens if you stick your head in a particle acceler...
by rahoulb on Tuesday August 10, 2021 @09:47AM
(#28128815)
There have also been experiments run on split brain patients that suggest our idea of self is a reactionary rationalisation based on what the rest of our brain is doing.
For example - asking, whispered into one ear, a person to get a drink from a vending machine because I, the experimenter, wanted to take it home with me to drink later. Then when the subject returns, asking, whispered into the other ear, why they got the drink, to which they reply "because I was thirsty"
This suggests even just half the brain can maintain the full set of higher cognitive abilities of a normal healthy human, but only half the motor control, which is presumably more dependent on hard-coded IO ports between the brain itself and the nerve buses running to the actual body part being controlled.
Which is to say there is an actual "right side of the face" zone, but there is no zone for higher reasoning in general. Unless you destroy the entire frontal cortex, much smaller subsets of it can fully function as if whole.
I think Daniel Dennett used this evidence to argue that the entire notion of self is an illusion. The brain is so highly redundant that it really consists of countless selves, a distributed system that dynamically comes to consensus but each component is fully capable of operating on its own or as part of a smaller distributed system when the network gets partitioned.