Posted on 11/04/2011 2:52:30 PM PDT by neverdem
ST. HELENA, Calif. — The scientists exchanged one last look and held their breath.
Everything was ready. The electrode was in place, threaded between the two hemispheres of a living cat’s brain; the instruments were tuned to pick up the chatter passing from one half to the other. The only thing left was to listen for that electronic whisper, the brain’s own internal code.
The amplifier hissed — the three scientists expectantly leaning closer — and out it came, loud and clear.
“We all live in a yellow submarine, yellow submarine, yellow submarine ....”
“The Beatles’ song! We somehow picked up the frequency of a radio station,” recalled Michael S. Gazzaniga, chuckling at the 45-year-old memory. “The brain’s secret code. Yeah, right!”
Dr. Gazzaniga, 71, now a professor of psychology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, is best known for a dazzling series of studies that revealed the brain’s split personality, the division of labor between its left and right hemispheres. But he is perhaps next best known for telling stories, many of them about blown experiments, dumb questions and other blunders during his nearly half-century career at the top of his field...
--snip--
He decided to write a letter to the director of the program, the eminent neurobiologist Roger Wolcott Sperry (emphasizing reason No. 1). Could Dr. Sperry use a summer intern? “He said sure,” Dr. Gazzaniga said. “I always tell students, ‘Go ahead and write directly to the person you want to study with; you just never know.’ ”
At Caltech that summer after his junior year, he glimpsed his future. He learned about so-called split-brain patients, people with severe epilepsy who had surgery cutting the connections between their left and right hemispheres. The surgery drastically reduced seizures but seemed to leave people otherwise unaffected...
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
The New York Times had the entire Right side of their political brain removed. Now the only thing it does is echo leftist talking points.
If they want to study a criminal’s brain, they have no farther to look than Bill Clinton’s noggin.
I learned how to turn my brain on. Didn’t think about turning it off.
Still living with the consequences.
I was looking for a story about high functioning schizophrenics, which is linked on the above link, when I stumbled across Decoding the Brains Cacophony.
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