The Cognitive Revolution in 1981 Dr
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APPENDIX ONE The Cognitive Revolution In 1981 Dr. Roger Sperry of Caltech won a Nobel Prize for his pioneering work on understanding the organization of the brain. Since it was Sperry's work that led to the insights we have been exploring in this book, a review of his fascinating split-brain experiments is in order. The brains of all mammals are divided into two dis tinctly separate halves, or hemispheres, which are con nected only by a narrow band of nerves called the corpus callosum. Each half of the brain is directly connected only to the nerves and muscles on the opposite side of the body. The optic nerve connections to the retina of the eye are likewise crossed so that the right half of the brain sees only the left side of the visual field 1 and vice versa. This sepa ration of control has a survival value because during a battle you have two independent channels at work: Threats from the right can be dealt with by the left brain while at the same time the right brain handles threats from the left. 257 258 APPENDIX ONE THE SPLIT-BRAIN EXPERIMENTS Back in the 1950s, Dr. Sperry began doing animal experiments to discover how the two halves of the brain interact. These experiments ultimately led to his being awarded the Nobel prize. He found that when the two hemispheres of a cat's or monkey's brain were surgically separated, the animals remained remarkably normal. Sperry created an apparatus for separately communicating with each half of the animal's brain by briefly flashing images to their left or right visual field. The animal was trained to use one paw or the other to press a lever in response to specific flashed shapes. Since the left visual field and the left paw are controlled by the right hemi sphere, and vice versa, he was able to demonstrate separate and independent learning in the two halves of the animal's brain. He separately trained each side of the animal for a different response: The right paw (left hemisphere) was trained to press a lever whenever an "X" was flashed on the right, but ignore an "0"; the left side was trained to do the exact opposite. It was almost as if the animal had two separate minds, each trained for a different response. The real breakthrough came in 1962 when Dr. Sperry, and his students Michael Gazzaniga and Jerre Levy, had the opportunity to study a human split-brain patient who had undergone the split-brain surgery to control epileptic sei zures. Though the split-brain surgery had been done on other humans 20 years earlier and the examining doctors had concluded that the operation had no effect on the patients' mental abilities, Sperry used his new test techniques to separately test the two halves of the new patient's brain with amazing results. THE COGNITIVE REVOLUTION 259 FIGURE 12. A classic split-brain experiment of Sperry. The subject stares at a spot on the screen while a slide projector flashes a message to the nonverbal side of the subject's surgically split brain. In the example shown he will be verbally unaware that he saw the word "pencil" yet his left hand will easily retrieve the pencil from the selection of objects. The apparatus used is illustrated in Figure 12. Infor mation was communicated to only one side of the subject's brain at a time by having him stare at a spot while words or pictures were flashed to one side or the other of his visual field. By having the subject respond with one hand or the other, it was possible to get separate responses from each hemisphere. For example, when the word "pencil" was flashed on the left, the subject's left hand could easily 260 APPENDIX ONE pick a pencil out of a collection of objects hidden behind a panel. His right hand couldn't pick the correct object be cause that side of the brain only saw things on the right and had therefore seen nothing. Since normal communi cations between the two halves of the brain were cut, each hand could respond only if the message was flashed on its side of vision. The amazing part was when the subject was asked which object he had picked he could answer only for his right hand. When his left hand picked something he would insist that he had seen nothing! When pressed for an explana tion, he would answer something like, "Well, I must have done it unconsciously," or "I guessed.,,2 Clearly his self module only knew about the messages flashed on the right side. The actual act of reading the flashed message and picking an object on the left was clearly done by an inde pendent module on the other side of his brain! Without the unifying control of the connections be tween the two halves of the brain, the patient sometimes had conflicts that clearly demonstrated the separate paral lel modules of the mind. To quote an article by Sperry3: ... while the patient was dressing and trying to pull on his trousers the left hand might start to work against the right to pull the trousers down on that side. Or, the left hand, after just helping to tie the belt of the patient's robe, might go ahead on its own to untie the completed knot, whereupon the right hand would have to supervene again to retie it. The patient and his wife used to refer to the "sinister left hand" that sometimes tried to push the wife away aggres sively at the same time that the hemisphere of the right hand was trying to get her to come and help him with something. THE COGNITIVE REVOLUTION 261 Such conflicts are not common because the two halves of the brain normally develop a kind of working agreement whereby each side tends to take over control in situations where it feels most comfortable. In another article4 Dr. Sperry summarized the effect of the operation as follows: ... in the split brain syndrome we deal with two separate spheres of conscious awareness, i.e., two separate conscious entities or minds running in par allel in the same cranium, each with its own sensa tions, perceptions, cognitive processes, learning experiences, memories, and so on. Though it didn't become clear until many years later, this demonstration of two centers of thinking in one head was only a beginning. The simplified concept of two kinds of thinking was a useful first step that was easily demon strated in the split-brain patients. Later studies, by Dr. Michael Gazzaniga, on dozens of other patients who had undergone the split-brain operation convinced him that the mind was actually divided into a large number of separate modules. One of these modules, which he called the "interpreter," tried to explain all behavior, even when that behavior was clearly driven by other modules. For example, in one experiment Gazzaniga flashed the word "laugh" to the subject's right, nonverbal, hemisphere. To quote Gazzaniga5: After the stimulus was presented, one patient laughed and, when asked why, said: "you guys come up and test us every month. What a way to make a living!" In still another example, when the command "walk" is flashed to the right hemisphere, patients will typically stand up from their chairs and begin to leave the testing van. When asked where he or she is 262 APPENDIX ONE going, the person's left brain says, for example, "I'm going into the house to get a coke." However you manipulate this type of test, it always yields the same kind of result. The split-brain patients make it possible to scientifi cally demonstrate the firmly ingrained habit the self mod ule has of making up stories to explain and take credit for behavior caused by other modules. Since the right brain modules are surgically disconnected, we know positively when the behavior was not under control of the self. Since the self module can be very clever at using subtle cues, the split-brain patients can appear very normal if special ap paratus is not used. For example, without the special flash projection apparatus, eye movements make it possible for both hemispheres to see both sides of vision. If the hands are not obscured from vision during left-hand pointing responses, the self module can see what the left hand pointed to and will, without hesitation, use this information to explain the response. For example, in one experiment a snow scene was flashed on the left and a chicken claw on the right. The subject pointed with his right hand at a card on the table with a chicken on it, and his left hand chose a snow shovel. When asked why he made these choices he answered, without hesitation, "Oh, that's easy. The chicken claw goes with the chicken and you need a shovel to clean out the chicken shed.,,6 A normal person would have known that the shovel was a snow shovel but, deprived of the stronger answer that seeing the snow scene would have provided, the subject's self module simply confabulated a plausible answer. Without the special lab setup, the split-brain patients are so good at bluffing their way around their handicaps that THE COGNITIVE REVOLUTION 263 they appear quite normal to most observers. Back in the 1940s, Dr. A. J. Akelaitis performed split-brain surgery on 25 patients. His published report concluded that the operation had no effect on the patients' mental or physical abilities.7 The self module's long standing habit of "filling in" to fabricate a consistent conscious experience makes disconnection of half of the brain an event that is scarcely noticed.