From: gmark@cbnewse.cb.att.com (gilbert.m.stewart)
Subject: Re: t// Re: t-- Re: t// t// Re: REC.ORG.MENSA TODAY
Organization: AT&T
Date: Sat, 10 Oct 1992 17:09:17 GMT

In article <1992Oct9.185514.13927@walter.cray.com> sonic@bearpit.cray.com (Curtis Swanson) writes:
>Granted, these are possible explanations for such behavior (BTW, whats' a
>severed corpus callosum and how does it relate schizophrenia and/or multiple
>personalities?) but I prefer to go under the assumption that Scott (whoever)

Certain types of seizures were thought to be caused by a communication
problem between the two lobes of the brain.  Some patients underwent
a surgical procedure that involved severing the corpus callosum.  Surprisingly,
these patients appeared completely unchanged except for the elimination of
the seizures.  

As a side note, I had assumed that knowledge of this procedure was more
common, especially on a newsgroup with so many people professing to know
about intelligence and "how the brain works" and those those who claim
to "study the brain scientifically", but that's quite an assumption
on my part.  Especially for a large group.  For anyone that cares, the
corpus callosum is a big bunch of nerve fibers around the hippocampus
and therabouts that enables the two sides of the brain to communicate
with each other.  Now that I've informed anyone who's interested, and
probably insulted anyone who's not, I'll get back to something I think is
very important and surprising.

Later studies on these individuals at Cal Tech showed something, that, in
my opinion, is a rather marvelous demonstration of just how uncertain
our opinions, memories, and what we perceive as "reality" really is.

Subjects were given stimuli that were different for each side of the brain.
That is, the right hand would be in one box and given a particular object,
the left hand another.  The right eye would be shown a picture different
from that shown to the left eye.  And of course, the left brain would
then be exposed to what the right sensory input was and the right brain,
due to the crossover arrangement of nerves in the body, from the left
eye, hand, etc..

Now, if you figured that now that the brain halves are separate that
there would be a confusion in what was perceived as the single "experience"
that the entire "person" experienced, you'd be right.  Now, lots of
television shows have covered this.  You may have seen the experiment
where the right eye is shown, for example, a spoon, and the left eye is
shown a fork.  When questioned, the more verbal left brain reports 
what the right eye has seen -- a spoon.  When the left hand, however, draws
a picture of what has been seen by the "individual", a fork is drawn.

There have also been experiments in which the two sides, two hands,
actually fight to "help" the other side in a task for which one side
or the other is more optimized and skillful.

But it gets better.  When the "individual" is asked about why the verbal
and drawn descriptions differ, the "individual", actually the left, verbal
side, begins to desperately RATIONALIZE THE DIFFERENCE.  The experiment
I remember most vividly showed a subject trying to explain exactly why
the bird drawn was the same as an orange.  And ended up being satisfied
with the obviously ridiculous attempt.

Now, remember studies of subjects who had had very vivid dreams.  These
subjects were then shown evidence that these dreams, for one reason or
another, could not possibly have happened.  These subjects then proceeded
to create auxilliary "experiences" to explain rather preposterous
situations or alternate explanations to reaffirm their original "memories",
which were actually dreams, in an only slightly modified version.  ("Ah,
it wasn't Richard Nixon, but someone who looked very much like him, and
it wasn't really a blue moose, but a moose of very light fur coloring
in some kind of blue light from, um, a fire nearby, where some kind of
chemicals were burning...")

Then there is the holographic nature of memory storage.  Most of us know
of stroke patients who have had various ability and memory loss due to
real damage of portions of the brain due to the oxygen deprivation during
cardiac failure.  These patients often regain significant portions of their
ability due to the redundancy built into the human brain.  By "holographic"
nature of storage, I'm referring to the concept of a particular memory
being stored not in one location, but of the memory actually being a vast
complex of various concepts, perceptions, qualities, type of information,
in both spatial and temporal categorizations.  The bottom line to this is
that a damaged memory, either from the extreme case of stroke or the
simple case of deterioration over time -- forgetting -- can be restructured
by the brain's "filling in" of details that are not really KNOWN but
EXTRAPOLATED to fit the brain's pre-conceived framework of what "looks
right".  There is a theory that dreams are sometimes very difficult to
remember because there is less collaborative stimuli from other inputs
for the brain to support the memory.  E. g., the dream was of running
in the woods, but the body felt no cold, no wetness, no exertion aside 
from tossing and turning in bed.  Sometimes, however, these collaborative
stimuli are not needed, and this dream, or daydream, or hallucination,
or random thought becomes a MEMORY, and is perceived as a store impression
of FACT.  And it is not necessarily a significant event or a fact that
can be vocalized.  It may be a perception or other feeling, possibly only
a relation between the existence of some stimulus, e. g., a person's face,
and a feeling of dread.  Aversion therapy works like this.  Take a rat
and administer shocks whenever the color blue is present, and the rat will
HATE blue.

This mechanism of the human mind has been developed through evolution
to enable us to generalize without having to reason out every detail.
It has enabled us to react to situations that are not evaluatable by
the largest database and largest supercomputer ever built.  Only by
the use of biological fuzzy logic and natural neural net processing
can we instantaneously know that we should be wary of the shadow in
the parking lot, or that our leg should shoot out just a bit farther
to prevent our stumbling or that the table we've constructed really
needs that extra brace placed just so, even though we don't really
know why conciously, and claim, quaintly, that we're just using 
"common sense".  It is, if anything truly can be, a miracle.  

But we are under the delusion that what we "know", we really "know".
That we are sensible, linear, logical "individuals" that perceive
"reality" in a very objective manner.  We SAW it.  We were THERE.
We KNOW.  

I wonder how much of our lives and how many of our perceptions are
just convenient rationalizations to reconcile our secure, conservative
images of ourselves in our left brain, while the right brain or the
reflexes of the rest of the body just go on their merry way, with the
"individual" along for the ride, convincing itself that it knows what
can, should, and will be done, and that it will do it. 

This notion of complete control, I think, may be somewhat delusionary,
and I think it may be more constructive to make use of these tools
we have been given.  Any of you who play a musical instrument may know
the feeling of "giving up oneself" to the instrument.  We know that there
is no way that a person can play a song of any complexity while consciously
planning, reading, preparing for, and executing each note.  Some of it
has to be "automatic".  It is known that there are methods for drawing
on those bilogical "automatic peripheral devices" of the body to gain
new skills.  It has been demonstrated that drawing, for instance, is a 
skill that can be improved dramatically when a subject "gets in the right
frame of mind", letting go of concrete machiniations or "systems".
Anyone who has learned to ride a bike knows that what little there is
about it that can be explained verbally is nowhere near sufficient to
actually ride it.  "You just get up and, um, kind of, um pedal, and go!"

There are examples in many pop-psychological courses, all under different
names.  "New Age Thinking".  "Masterthinker".  "Unleashing Creativity".
"Positive Image to Realization".  These are drawing on those "other"
"mini-individuals" or in reality, the normal biological and psychological 
subsystems the human body (and other bodies) has evolved that support,
but are not one and the same with, the concious personality.  Some of
you may recognize this as a Zen approach.  

When we react to a feeling or a suspicion, we MUST recognize BOTH
its VALUE and its DANGER.  Hate and fear and bigotry are not usually
the outgrowth of logic.  They are outgrowths of our subsystems reacting
to perceived threats and learned biases.  We cannot ignore these emotions.
But we cannot, we MUST NOT allow them to control our thought processes
without proper analysis.  For that, we must be aware that they are
merely another in the wonderful set of tools we have been blessed with
that can cause inefficiency, strife, damage, sadness, and fear, or
they can be used to let us create, support, understand, achieve and
enjoy.

GMS