Kai - If you'll excuse me getting tangential using Voodoo's post as a starting point.... :-)

It seems to me that the problem with "folk" or experientially based concepts of the mind is that - even with meditation which can make us very aware of how our mind works - we're likely to get trapped in a bit of a circular catch-22 because any mechanisms we have for fooling ourselves (or making sense out of things) will indeed foil us in our ability to look at ourselves. The old "experiencing is believing" trap, or more accurately the story (sense-making) we tell ourselves as we have an experience is the one we believe. We're not so good with the unknown, it's outside of our nature which is to know and make sense of the world.

It's always seemed very relevant to me that both Freud and Jung - the granddaddies of psychiatry and psychology - were both quite influenced by Eastern philosophies and meditation (which was having quite an impact all over Europe at the time). Freud's Uber Ego (which I've read didn't mean "super" ego as it is often translated but meant something more along the lines of "above ego") is pretty much in line with the idea of the witnessing consciousness that can look at one's thoughts in a detached manner. Now, I don't bring this up to assert any kind of primacy of Eastern philosophies but since there was no other way to actually watch the mind at the point in time - all there was was experiential reporting with no way to objectively observe brain/mind processes -I think it's worth knowing and puts some things into context. It's only really since we've been able to watch the brain in action since the invention of MRIs that we've really been able to leap forward in our understanding of brain processes and how they create the experience of mind. I suspect lots of disciplines - philosophy in particular but it's by no means alone - have a lot of catching up to do now that there are more facts to fill in what's been basically speculation up until this point. Everyone loves science until it kills their pet theory! ;-)

Michael said:

"how the hell did the body do that? reduce blood-flow to one hemisphere - unilateral constriction (as in a cramp) of a deep vein? and if so, why did nobody inject you with a muscle relaxant? And if they thought it might be a stroke, there are also immediate interventions that palliate some (most?) of the potential longer term damage that are better than "let's see if this goes into overload", I believe. Of course, I'm aware of the ease of carrying out a post hoc diagnosis...

- can you repeat the experiment with the other side please? I'd like to see whether you would then say 'first' or 'second'... I'm only partly facetious here - I wonder whether this 'second' has a deeper meaning, a sort of internal prioritization of the two potential areas of awareness in the bicameral mind - a sort of dominant version, and a backup (regular updates/synchronizations via the corpus callosum. Or whether - more trivially - you subconsciously associate left(handedness) with second rate, and your vocalization module just fired off without being able to get all the back-up certification papers signed due to the temporary closure of the responsible ministry ;) "

Actually, it's not at all weird that bloodflow to one hemisphere but not the other can be restricted - that there is a separate set of blood vessels for each. It's a bit like lungs or kidneys: it's the old one-in-reserve backup strategy. If something happens to one hemisphere, the other is unaffected - same evolutionary strategy. (Of course the sides in this case are NOT simple mirror images, but they can function as such to a limited degree, as functions usually found on one side can be learned by the other - in some cases. When discussing things neurological, one finds oneself constantly qualifying one's statements...) And it often (usually, I think) happens that it's just one side in a stroke victim.

As for why they didn't give me standard treatments for possible stroke victims, well, despite my various snarky comments about the docs mechanically following a basic script they probably read in some med school class, etc., I have to cut them some slack here and assume that they figured since I was still quite ambulatory it was not a stroke; i.e., I felt numb on the left, but otherwise my motor functions were completely unaffected - I could walk, etc., and I could take the pen in my left hand and try to write, which is relatively fine motor control.

A serious stroke victim would have exhibited gross motor control problems on the affected side, I think, up to and including complete paralysis, so the docs most likely ruled that out upon seeing my physical performance. So they displayed an appropriate level of expertise as far as that went. (But don't get me started on MD's and *social* intelligence and emotional sensitivity - there they often get a D- even when they score A+ on the technical knowledge. I could relate, at greater length than here, a story of when my mom went in for risky open heart surgery in a first-rate university hospital [U-Penn] and no-one came around to tell my dad, waiting anxiously nearby, that it had gone well. (I was around too, but not at the hospital like him.) After more than several hours, he finally tracked someone down to ask and got an answer that was clearly only a careless afterthought.)

What's interesting from our readings about the severed corpus callosum patients is how much in everyday situations they could function quite normally, with an apparently unitary consciousness, as each side. simply by turning the head slightly, can take in the same sensory info and come to a basic agreement on "what's out there", unlike the artificial environment of the experimental lab, where input to each eye (or nostril in some cases) was carefully segregated. There is still coordination despite the lack of corpus callosum-based sharing and (presumably) synthesis of data. (Our prof was laughing - darkly - at the ignorance and hubris of the neuropsychiatrists of the mid-20th century who assumed that the c.c. could be cut without major consequences since all it did was send electrical impulses back and forth during epileptic seizures, and the even more ignorant docs of earlier eras who assumed it didn't have *any* function other than maybe to hold the two hemispheres together, like some form of cartilage!)

As for the Deep Meaning of why I said "second" for "left" - this of course is why it stands out in my memory of the event. It's possible that, yes, it reflects my unconscious mental map of my neurobiological self - the right side of the body is the "first" side. (See below for the comments I didn't include with the first post, where I discuss the role of being a lefthanded twin.) As for the more psychologistic explanation - that it reflects some internalized sense of inferiority as a lefthander in a right-handed world, well, maybe - as a child in Germany, a country where they "don't believe in being lefthanded", I was briefly in a kindergarten where, as my lefthanded mom discovered one day when she showed up to pick me up, the teacher would slap my left hand whenever I tried to use it to draw. My mom said there I was, struggling to draw with my right hand... She was NOT amused. Teacher got yelled at in the best German my mom could muster. :-) (I remember nuzzink... just what my mom told me years later.) But it might be equally the case that since my speech and writing centers are on the *right* side (again, see below), and I'm a very verbally/linguistically oriented person (780 on my verbal SAT in high school), my psychic "center of gravity", so to speak, is on the right, and so subconsciously I think of everything on the left as "second". But this is all speculative. As Fifi said:

""It makes sense to me that "second" and "left" might become confused but perhaps it was coincidence and you could just as easily have second "potato" as "left"."

(Uh, Fifi - you feeling OK? Any numbness? You said "second" where you meant "said". ;-) Just kidding.) Not long after I said "second" for "left" I said all sorts of "potatoes" for various words, as the aphasia deepened.... That random "rewiring" *is* fascinating, though scary.

Voodoo said (in ref to Churchland's critique of folk-psychology as the basis for consciousness theory):

"When something goes wrong, suddenly vague concepts like "self", "consciousness", "will" and "knowledge" begin to come unglued."

and

"Nonetheless, when a conceptual framework becomes unhinged so easily and in so many ways as does our folk psychology, it's hard to resist the conclusion that some serious revision of our basic "mind concepts" is in store. Seems to me this revision has been underway since the beginning of neuroscience, if not the beginning of psychology, but some reactionary philosophers abhor the idea."

Well said.

Yeah, this is why I think it's the exceptions, the unusual cases, the phenomena on the margins, that are so valuable in science (and why philosophers often set up seemingly contrived thought experiments, often with liberal use of counterfactuals, to make a point.) As Isaac Asimov said, "The most exciting thing to hear in science is not 'Eureka!', but 'that's funny...'". We can study "normal" brains up the wazoo but only stumble across certain questions when we look at the "abnormal".

I like a lot of what Churchland (and her husband Paul, the *other* Churchland ;-) has to say and generally agree with her stick-to-the-material-explanation approach, but a lot of the problems of apparent brain-mind duality - the problems of reductionism in whatever of its various forms - may ultimately either not be resolvable or turn out to be fundamental misconceptions for reasons other than those she posits. I suspect much of it may be problems with the way we form and use language. (Lakoff again.) So much more to learn. Overall I agree with her that you can't have a fruitful philosophy of mind without the reality check of neuroscience. But I'd caution that some aspects of our folk-psychology may yet turn out to be useful, if they can be separated from the self-delusional. (Of course, the term "self-delusional" is itself a term of folk psychology. Heh.)

Brains are orders of magnitude more complex than almost anything else we study (cars among other things ;-), except maybe the universe itself. Just to go off on another tangent for a mo', one of the other students in my class mentioned something about holography as a model of both cognition *and* the universe! Interesting, but I have no idea how seriously it's taken in either cogsci or physics.


And Fifi said:

"The old "experiencing is believing" trap, or more accurately the story (sense-making) we tell ourselves as we have an experience is the one we believe."

Yes, the phenomenological self-referential trap - this is a big one in the literature...

One of the funnier examples from the split-brain patients is when different commands were flashed (cue cars) to the two sides, with the non-linguistic (right) side being prompted to get up and leave the room, and when the linguistic (left) side was asked by the researcher "why did you get up and go out?" he/it replied with a post-hoc explanation of "oh, I just felt like stretching my legs" or something like that. In other words, it was trying to take credit for the "willed" decision of the other half, trying to make sense of it in a way that preserved the illusion of sole control. The need to feel that "I" am in control is central. This extends to non-split brains in the sense that sometimes we'll do things that originate subconsciously, but tell ourselves that oh yes I'm doing this because *X*...

An analogy that occurred to me in class was of the times a cat does something spectacularly ungraceful (falling off the couch or a table while yawning and stretching was one our cats in in my old place in SF sometimes did - eeeeeuuuuhhhh - WHAP) and then collects itself and glares at the chuckling human: I MEANT to do that!

We tell ourselves there's a single conscious, rational "I" in charge at all times, but it ain't necessarily so. (Maybe some other "I" meant to do that.)

Anyway, here's the other part I didn't post before; my thoughts have changed a bit since I wrote it. (BTW, the term "part-person" I mention is from Mortensen's paper which is located at www.cogsci.ecs.soton.ac.uk/cgi/...ewpsy )

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So what I learned from it all (after multiple checkups and discussions with neurologists, a CAT scan and an EEG) was

1) That my speech center(s), unlike most people's, but not unheard of, is (are) in my right hemisphere. (And so, apparently, is whatever area handles writing.) Upon further research I figured out that I'm what's called a mirror twin: apparently in some sets of twins, one twin is not only left-handed but also has some other cognitive functions reversed between hemispheres. (I've read that most lefthanders have their speech centers in the usual left hemisphere or partially shared between the two, going along with a more general diffusion of other functions, aided by a larger corpus callosum than in the general population. Mine is strictly in the right, as vividly demonstrated by my experience.) I'll never know for sure, since my twin died and there's no way to do tests for comparison between us, but my mom, who's also left-handed, has mentioned by way of analogy that there's a theory that every left-handed person had a twin at some point in gestation, with most, I suppose, being unviable at a blastocyte stage and being absorbed back into the mother's tissues.

2) That external behaviour and internal experience can differ radically. Internal coherence, external total inarticulation. I was perhaps a “part-person” in terms of losing my communicative abilities for a short while – a part-person from the third person, objective point of view, but I was internally, from the first person, subjective point of view, still quite whole.

3) That one should be careful to differentiate between “thought” language and “expressed” - spoken or written - language. I could think just fine during my episode, in silent language, so to speak, just as one does when mulling over ideas before committing them to paper or speaking them to others. And I understood everything people were saying. I just couldn't express my own thoughts or tell others definitely that I understood their speech. (I could nod yes, but that could still be taken ambiguously.) I wonder if a few diagnoses of *comprehension* aphasia in patients have been hasty – the doc assuming that if the patient can't communicate at all they must not be able to understand at all either. (Kind of a functionalist stance, eh.) I hope not. I was fortunate to come out of a *communicative* aphasic state after a short period, from which I have clear memories of my intact comprehension.

4) Since the hemiparetic migraine inhibited my right hemispheric areas which normally handle expression, but it didn't keep me from thinking clearly, perhaps that (important!) aspect of my cognition is a) more laterally dispersed and can quickly adjust to the loss of the use of part of its neural substrate, or b) is handled solely on the left side, which would suggest that the corpus callosum plays a big role in the transition from my thoughts to my speech and writing. (Of course, to just say “thoughts” is almost folk-psychological; there are quite a few kinds of “thought.” But at the very least a thinking *in language* remained intact during my episode.)

5) that exceptions to general rules (in this case about human neurological wiring) can illuminate issues in ways that just looking at the statistical majority can't. It suggests that research on twins and lefthanders may have more to reveal about brain states in general.

Fred - "The notion of a unitary self hardly fits the observations of the Neuropsychologist."

Very true, but that notion we hold of ourselves is integral to even neuropsychologists' ability to function in a mundane way ;-)