What Happens if Your Brain is Split in Two?

• Nate Deviate
  February 8th, 2008 at 9:14 pm

  That is so Strange..

• Matt
  February 8th, 2008 at 9:29 pm

  Destroying the brain and nervous system is an old psychiatric method.

  Personally I think mutilating someone’s body to produce an effect is disgusting.

• Lemons
  February 8th, 2008 at 9:45 pm

  The effect they were intending to produce was the end of his seizures. The doctors didn’t just chop his brain up for the heck of it, but it wouldn’t make any sense *not* to study the resultant side effects.

• Lan-the-Pianist
  February 8th, 2008 at 11:18 pm

  I learned about this in Psyc 101. Back then (and even now) they didn’t have much of an understanding of the brain and really just tried to come up with solutions to ease the life of the patient without really being able to predict the effects.

  At least we’re not still prescribing electroshock therapy and lobotomies left and right like they used to. Watching those electroshock videos was disturbing =\

• TT
  February 9th, 2008 at 1:56 am

  Thank you for that!

  That explains a lot. Absolutely fascinating, isn’t it?

• Indie
  February 9th, 2008 at 2:29 am

  Lan-the-pianist,
  you have never seen a real ECT treatment have you? It’s nothing like what you think. Though it does involve using a shock, it is the most natural treament we have in respect to neurochemistry (point being that you don’t alter the levels of different neurotransmittors pharmaceutically). It is also the most affective treatment we have against depression. You were right about lobotomies though: they are completely out of the picture clinically (at least in modern medicine; i’m sure trepanation still exists in some form or other)…

• Larfin Jackarse
  February 9th, 2008 at 2:37 am

  Electroshock therapy does continue today on a large scale (relative). Check wikipedia as a starting point.

• Indie
  February 9th, 2008 at 5:36 am

  Yes, you’re right: it does. Spent an entire day yesterday at an ECT clinic as a part of my internship.

• DreadLetterDay
  February 9th, 2008 at 6:16 am

  I lost my right eye some five years ago, though i still have the corpus callosum of course, i wonder if there might be any effects (aside from some depth perception problems ).

  Cool video… I’ve read about this effect before, but never seen it in action.

• DreadLetterDay
  February 9th, 2008 at 6:18 am

  also, while labotomies are definitely out, the burning away of non-diseased structures definitely does happen in the treatment of extreme depression, for example.

  google is your ally.

• Erik Olson
  February 9th, 2008 at 4:42 pm

  Thanks a ton for posting it.
  Once again, you’ve made my day better.
  And nice timing too.
  Because I’m hanging out with the beautiful Gaby Kubik right now.

• castaa11
  February 9th, 2008 at 8:56 pm

  Very interesting- coincidentally, I wrote a short paper about this just a few days ago, and here it shows up on Neatorama!

• Jenny K.
  February 9th, 2008 at 9:53 pm

  I know it isn’t as interesting as the video but I wonder how this treated his seizures?

• MoonCake
  February 10th, 2008 at 11:12 am

  this is crazy nuts, yo! absolutely phenominal.

• DanO
  February 11th, 2008 at 8:18 am

  that guy would be excellent at sense o sketches when playing cranium.

• MStrickl
  February 11th, 2008 at 10:28 am

  For anyone interested by this clip, I would highly highly recommend reading Dragons of Eden by Carl Sagan. It is a fascinating look into the human brain and the evolution of human intelligence. It is inspiring and educational, but not in a put me to sleep science factoid way. Carl Sagan is (was) the best science writer on the planet.

• robgonzo
  February 11th, 2008 at 1:21 pm

  i saw a similar video years back. That patient was given tasks to do, like stacking blocks or something, with one hand and other hand kept interfering. At one point his hand slapped his other to keep it out of the way and eventually the patient had to sit on his hand to finish his task. Fascinating stuff.

• heather
  February 13th, 2008 at 3:44 pm

  That’s really interesting. it makes you think about the nature of your own thought processes and our sense of being. Deep stuff.

• Nicholas Dollak
  February 13th, 2008 at 9:27 pm

  Re; #13 (Jenny K.) - Epileptic siezures, if I remember correctly, have something to do with the firing of neurons in response to each other. This is true for most thought processes, such as the ability to say the name of an object we see. In epileptics, the firing becomes erratic, and siezures are the result. In the case of Joe, firing in one hemisphere triggered firing in the other and back again, so splitting the corpus callosum seemed like a reasonable way to disrupt the problem.

  The down side is that he cannot name objects perceived only by his right brain (left eye). In his (and most people’s) brain, the language center is in the left hemisphere, and the artistic skills are in the right hemisphere. (Keep in mind that these hemispheres control the opposite sides of the body, which is why his right brain perceives what his left eye sees, and why he can draw the objects with his left hand. I’m also using “artistic” in a very broad sense; his drawings are purely functional. In a true artist, the artistic abilities are less compartmentalized in the brain than in non-artists.)

  Strobe lights can trigger siezures in both epilleptics and non-epilleptics (although the strobing frequencies required to do this are different), which is why it is prudent to warn audiences if a strobe light is to be used in a performance. I still have no idea what’s happening in a whole sequence near the end of the original “Alien” film, because of the strobe light that accompanies the ship’s auto-destruct. After about three seconds of the flashing, I get serious migraine and have to cover my eyes. I wonder if there are plans to release some “ultimate” DVD of the movie with a strobe-free version of that scene as an extra feature…?

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