The Man with Two Minds: William Jenkins and the Split Brain
After surgeons severed the connection between William Jenkins's brain hemispheres to stop his seizures, researchers discovered his hands could act independently, revealing a startling truth: the unified 'you' is a story the brain narrates after the fact.
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Surgeons severed the corpus callosum of veteran William Jenkins to stop electrical storms of epilepsy.
The left hemisphere controls speech while the right hemisphere manages visuospatial skills and drawing.
Information trapped in the right hemisphere can trigger physical reactions like blushing without verbal awareness.
The left hemisphere acts as an interpreter by inventing plausible stories for actions it did not initiate.
Split brain patients sometimes experience their hands fighting over which clothes to wear from a closet.
Human consciousness functions like a film editor stitching modular data into a single narrative fiction.
- 01Intro1 min
- 02The Surgical Divide2 min
- 03The Lab of Two Minds3 min
- 04The Great Pretender3 min
- 05The Narrative Fiction2 min
- 06Outro1 min
- Split-Brain: What We Know Now and Why This is Important for ...
- Michael Gazzaniga (PhD '65), Neuroscientist and Pioneer ...
- Inner Workings: Discovering the split mind - PMC - NIH
- One Head, Two Brains
- The split brain: A tale of two halves - Nature
- The “split brain” and Roger Wolcott Sperry (1913–1994)
- Research Notes - Voids: The Narrative Void
- Of Two Minds
- Title:
- The Constructed Self: A Critical Examination of the 'I' as Cognitive ...
- Michael Gazzaniga: The Father of Cognitive Neuroscience
- Does the Brain Lie? Re-reading Gazzaniga's Split-Brain ...
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