Two Brain Theory

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Today was a GREAT DAY.
I passed my driving test for Stroke Victims.
After my stroke, I lost a large portion of my vision. Most people who experience this never recover their vision. They spend their remaining days in a state of nearly partial blindness. It has been around 10 months from the day of my stroke and I have reached the point where I can pass a driving test. For the past 4 months I have been going once per week to an Occupational Therapist in the Rehabilitation and Sports Medicine Center. They have a very special driving program where I drive in a midsize city. I started out driving around regions of the city primarily in the 20 mph speed range and as I slowly progressed, I moved into regions at highway speeds. This is one of the strangest things I have ever done.

Over my lifetime I have always driven from around the age of 16. In other words I have driven cars for 57 years. For the most part I have been a very safe driver. I have driven approximately 1,000,000 miles in my lifetime.

And now I have passed a very important driving test. It is time to celebrate.

A neuroscientists view on exercise ? This was not the video I was expecting. .. sorry .

This seems to describe the TED video that was the next one on the list. I believe that woman was a neuroscientists that focused on exercise. Are you sure that you watched the video by Jill Bolte Taylor?

No……. Perhaps I was looking at the wrong one ?

You would know it is the right one by the following:

Near the beginning she brings out an actual human skull and opens it up to show the two halves.

Thank you but it was not a human skull but a actual brain she opens up . And her talk was quite inspiring ..
Thank you again. Her description of her experience was very insightful .

You are right - human brain not human skull.

I read her first book. It went into depth much more than her video. But you have to get past the first 120 pages to get into two brain theory.

I ordered her second book and it came in today. I was told that it provided even more detail.

Does sound rather fascinating but I am not been doing much reading lately .So my reading has gotten much less
Active. Other than the net. And even am only reading small shorter bits of information. Used to read quite abit more but got out of the habit,after husbands passing.
Hope you enjoy your new book when it arrives .

After my stroke, I lost my ability to read. I would look at words on the video screen and the letters would break apart right in front of my eyes and become an entirely new alphabet, one I couldn't even read. It was a very strange experience. The other part was that I did not lose my ability to write. Apparently these are held in different regions of the brain. It took me a week of hard work but I learned how to read again. It took me 20 minutes to read my first 3 letter word correctly. I would read one letter and then the next and then figure out that I made a mistake and the first letter was actually a different letter. Over and over again, until finally after 20 minutes, I finally read the word correctly.

Here is a link to an interesting article by Lizzie Schechter,

Splitting the difference: One person, two minds

In the article, she is discussing Two Brain Theory. She says the following:

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Despite the oft-repeated claim by researchers that, outside of the lab, these subjects [individuals who had a significant part of the corpus callosum severed] are “socially normal,” Schechter questions this claim in her book. A study conducted with six split-brain subjects found that they all struggled with significant and unusual behavioral problems outside of the lab: One hand interfering with the other as a subject tried to dress; subjects so paralyzed with indecision — or was it two minds wrestling with competing intentions? — that even making breakfast took hours.

So is there one mind or two? One person or two? Traditional explanations in philosophy tend to ascribe a 1-to-1 ratio of consciousness to personhood. But in “Self-Consciousness,” Schechter argues for what she calls a “reconciliation account.”

“The impression that a split-brain subject has two minds is correct,” she said. “But so is the impression that a split-brain subject is not just two human beings strapped together. They are one of us in an important, psychological sense: At the end of the day, they each think of themselves as ‘one’ of us, not two beings inhabiting the same body.”

They cannot help but to think this way, she said. They cannot live as two distinct psychological beings.

“If a split-brain subject were going to be distinct persons,” — that is, if each mind belonged to a distinct person — “that would mean that a split-brain subject were two of us. But the way two people can interact and think of themselves is just very different” than the way the two hemispheres can.

“It’s sort of like they are one of us,” Schechter said, “because they are not two of us.”

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I can go along with this. I feel that my two brains have a good working relationship. We work well together and have a time sharing agreement:
(normal [awake time] - right hemisphere,
and REM sleep - left hemisphere.)

there is a study Mc Gilchrist references in his book I wish I could find right now. The left side thinks its all that and more when left to its own 'analysis'.

This is an interesting YouTube discussion.



Neuroscientist Giulio Tononi discusses the bizarre phenomenon of "split-brain" patients with filmmaker Charlie Kaufman. More than inspiring interesting cinema and art, real cases of separate competing minds in one brain sheds light on the difficult problem of consciousness.

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I would say there are a couple points they are missing.
1. The two halves of the brain can develop a time sharing arrangement. REM sleep is a fairly short period of the 24 hour day, but when one of the brains can move at almost the speed of light, the sharing arrangement works well.
2. Sometimes the two brains do not have a choice in the arrangement. One half of the brain may go offline for a while due to an injury. The other half takes control, otherwise the individual dies. It can be a function of necessity.

The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World is a 2009 book written by psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist that deals with the specialist hemispheric functioning of the brain. The differing world views of the right and left brain (the "Master" and "Emissary" in the title, respectively) have, according to the author, shaped Western culture since the time of the ancient Greek philosopher Plato, and the growing conflict between these views has implications for the way the modern world is changing.
[1] In part, McGilchrist's book, which is the product of twenty years of research,
[2] reviews the evidence of previous related research and theories, and based on this and cultural evidence, the author arrives at his own conclusions.

This was still a very interesting video , except that one of the participants stated that if one area is developed , intensively later in life a corresponding part of the brain suffers . Which did cause me to have to consider, how he came to those conclusions as he did not cite any studies . My understanding is more that there is plenty of extra brain to go around.. Was not willing to agree with his hypothesis .

The following link is about researchers arguing about Two Brain Theory.

Could Two People Inhabit One Body?

The following theoretical point is made:

Puccetti argues that in patients where the nerve fibres linking the brain hemispheres have been severed in order to prevent interhemispheric epileptic seizures, the result is a doubling of consciousness, with two autonomous mental processes at work in one body. The left side of the brain controls and so displays mathematics and linguistics, while the right side has only a childlike linguistic ability, and controls artistic creativity. In a minority of cases the two hemispheres have little difference in ability, so if their cerebral commissures were severed the result would be two consciousnesses with equal abilities. This would be most likely to occur if brain bisection were done at infancy.

I am a slightly different case than the one listed above but let me try and make a conversion:
In my case, a severe injury put my left hemisphere off-line due to a massive head injury at around age 3 or 4. My right hemisphere survived and took over the activities of the left hemisphere. In other words my right hemisphere consciousness tried to perform the duties normally done by my left hemisphere.

The left side of the brain controls and so displays mathematics and linguistics, while the right side has only a childlike linguistic ability, and controls artistic creativity. But what is missing here is that I was still very young at the time of the injury, only around age 3 or 4. As a result, I was still growing and still evolving, this produced a very interesting and unique brain structure.

I watched the video to see what part you were referring to. I couldn't find it. It almost looks like you are watching a different video. I wonder if somehow when a link is saved and the link is the type that automatically moves to the next video when it is done, that it somehow moves the video forward.