Your Subconscious Mind Is Controlling You (And You Don't Know It)

A key flashes on the left of a screen for a tenth of a second. The man in the chair honestly says he saw nothing, yet his left hand finds the key anyway. That man was W.J., a war veteran and the first split-brain patient tested this way. How could his hand find what he never saw? This is the story of the split-brain experiments. In 1962, in Los Angeles, the surgeons Philip Vogel and Joseph Bogen cut W.J.'s corpus callosum, the bridge of more than 200 million nerve fibres between the two halves of the brain, to stop his seizures from spreading. At Caltech, Roger Sperry and a young Michael Gazzaniga then tested each half on its own, work that won Sperry half of the 1981 Nobel Prize. You'll also meet P.S., a boy whose two halves chose different dream jobs, the "interpreter" that invented a reason for a snow shovel, the Lund University choice blindness study where people explained choices they never made, and the 2017 Amsterdam study that reopened the debate: two minds in one body, or one mind that can't hear all of itself? History of scientific research, not medical advice. All sources always cited. CHAPTERS 0:00 "I saw nothing" 0:37 Take his chair 1:41 The bridge between two halves 2:17 Take a guess: what will the hand draw? 3:09 One session, two searchers 4:06 Were they just confused? 5:10 Not just one man 6:15 The part nobody tells you 7:13 Your brain does it too 8:00 Then the story flipped 8:59 Back to the dot SOURCES 1. Gazzaniga, M.S., Bogen, J.E. & Sperry, R.W. "Some functional effects of sectioning the cerebral commissures in man". PNAS 48(10), 1765-1769 (1962). https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.48.10.1765 2. Bogen, J.E., Fisher, E.D. & Vogel, P.J. "Cerebral commissurotomy: a second case report". JAMA 194(12), 1328-1329 (1965). https://doi.org/10.1001/jama.1965.030... 3. Sperry, R.W. "Hemisphere deconnection and unity in conscious awareness". American Psychologist 23(10), 723-733 (1968). https://doi.org/10.1037/h0026839 4. LeDoux, J.E., Wilson, D.H. & Gazzaniga, M.S. "A divided mind: observations on the conscious properties of the separated hemispheres". Annals of Neurology 2(5), 417-421 (1977). https://doi.org/10.1002/ana.410020513 5. Gazzaniga, M.S. & LeDoux, J.E. The Integrated Mind. Plenum Press (1978). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4899-22... 6. Wolford, G., Miller, M.B. & Gazzaniga, M. "The left hemisphere's role in hypothesis formation". Journal of Neuroscience 20(6), RC64 (2000). https://doi.org/10.1523/JNEUROSCI.20-... 7. Johansson, P., Hall, L., Sikström, S. & Olsson, A. "Failure to detect mismatches between intention and outcome in a simple decision task". Science 310, 116-119 (2005). https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1111709 8. Nielsen, J.A. et al. "An evaluation of the left-brain vs. right-brain hypothesis with resting state functional connectivity magnetic resonance imaging". PLoS ONE 8(8), e71275 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.... 9. Pinto, Y. et al. "Split brain: divided perception but undivided consciousness". Brain 140(5), 1231-1237 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1093/brain/aww358 10. Pinto, Y., Lamme, V.A.F. & de Haan, E.H.F. "Cross-cueing cannot explain unified control in split-brain patients". Brain 140(11), e68 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1093/brain/awx235 11. Volz, L.J. & Gazzaniga, M.S. "Interaction in isolation: 50 years of insights from split-brain research". Brain 140(7), 2051-2060 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1093/brain/awx139 12. de Haan, E.H.F. et al. "Split-brain: what we know now and why this is important for understanding consciousness". Neuropsychology Review 30, 224-233 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11065-020-09... 13. Gazzaniga, M.S. "Forty-five years of split-brain research and still going strong". Nature Reviews Neuroscience 6, 653-659 (2005). https://doi.org/10.1038/nrn1723 14. Gazzaniga, M.S. "The split-brain: rooting consciousness in biology". PNAS 111(51), 18093-18094 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1417892111 15. Sperry, R.W. "Some effects of disconnecting the cerebral hemispheres". Nobel Lecture (1981). https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/med... 16. Nobel Assembly at Karolinska Institutet. Press release, 9 October 1981. https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/med... 17. Corpus callosum fibre count: Tomasch, J. Anatomical Record 119, 119-135 (1954); Aboitiz, F. et al. Brain Research 598, 143-153 (1992). https://doi.org/10.1016/0006-8993(92)... 18. Voneida, T.J. "Roger Wolcott Sperry, 1913-1994". Biographical Memoirs 71, National Academy of Sciences (1997). https://www.nationalacademies.org/rea... 19. Interview with Joseph LeDoux. Emotion Researcher (ISRE). http://emotionresearcher.com/intervie... #splitbrain #neuroscience #psychology #brain #experiment #Curlosity