Pictures of the Mind by Miriam Boleyn-Fitzgerald

 

In the introduction of Pictures of the Mind: What the New Neuroscience Tells Us About Who We Are, Miriam Boleyn-Fitzgerald wrote:
  

Standard bedside tests for consciousness have remained largely unchanged for 30 years, as have the painful ambiguities that can accompany end-of-life decisions. Brain-imaging technologies may ease the agony of some of these complex choices by enhancing our understanding of the neural correlates of awareness.  Pictures of the brain responding to the world many one day become a standard tool to clarify when medical interventions are working to extend meaningful life and when they are inappropriately and painfully prolonging death.

Something that I found especially noteworthy was Boleyn-Fitzgerald pondering “experiences of self.”  She cited intriguing results from research into the “split-brain” phenomenon occurring in patients whose corpus callosum has been severed.  Some of the “bizarre effects of this radical procedure, which is performed as a last resort on patients with severe epilepsy” are chronicled in the work of Michael Gazzaniga, director of the SAGE Center for the Study of Mind at the University of California Santa Barbara.  A patient ‘Joe’ reported, “My right hemisphere and my left hemisphere now are working independent of each other, but you don’t notice it.  You just kind of adapt to it.  It doesn’t feel any different than it did before.”
 
Joe is “unable to consciously detect images to the left of a dot in the center of a computer screen, as these images are processed by his ‘disconnected’ right brain rather than by his left brain — the dominant hemisphere for language and speech.”  Although Joe can’t name the image or even consciously recognize that he’s seen it, he can close his eyes and draw it with his left hand.

Gazzaniga is quoted concerning the responses of split-brain patients when asked about this predicament: “. . . they immediately came up with a story as to why they were doing a particular act.  So they were interpreting behaviors that are coming out of them that were really generated by processes outside of the conscious awareness of the left hemisphere.”

Cited by the author, two source videos of Michael Gazzaniga presenting his perspective of split-brain patients may be viewed at YouTube: “Split brain behavioral experiments” and “Split-Brain Patients”.

Author Miriam Boleyn-Fitzgerald holds a degree in physics from Swarthmore College.  She worked as a staff writer for President Clinton’s Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments and as an analyst for the Natural Resources Defense Council and the Union of Concerned Scientists.