Bits and Pieces

I mentioned Michael Gazzaniga and his new book the other day, and thought it was so fascinating that I should plug it again.

Judging from the on-line example I've seen, it reminds me somewhat of Oliver Sacks territory. Neurological disorders are both fascinating and appalling, particularly when they present a first impression of normalcy. The fragility of not just our bodies, but our inmost selves, is worth a moment or two of nervous reflection.

Our brain is not a unified structure; instead it is composed of several modules that work out their computations separately, in what are called neural networks. These networks can carry out activities largely on their own...Yet even though our brain carries out all these functions in a modular system, we do not feel like a million little robots carrying out their disjointed activities. We feel like one, coherent self...How can this be?...if the brain is modular, a part of the brain must be monitoring all the networks’ behaviors and trying to interpret their individual actions in order to create a unified idea of the self.

Our best candidate for this brain area is the “left-hemisphere interpreter.” Beyond the finding...that the left hemisphere makes strange input logical, it includes a special region that interprets the inputs we receive every moment and weaves them into stories to form the ongoing narrative of our self-image and our beliefs.

I'm strongly reminded of an elderly woman I know. During an extended hospital stay, she would create the most outlandish explanations for what was happening around her, based upon overheard scraps of conversation that she had collected during the day. The overall effect was weird and unsettling if you had been present for all of the conversational inputs, which I had been.

I have called this area of the left hemisphere the interpreter because it seeks explanations for internal and external events and expands on the actual facts we experience to make sense of, or interpret, the events of our life.

Much of political discourse becomes explicable from this perspective.

The left-hemisphere interpreter is not only a master of belief creation, but it will stick to its belief system no matter what. Patients with “reduplicative paramnesia,” because of damage to the brain, believe that there are copies of people or places. In short, they will remember another time and mix it with the present.

As a result, they will create seemingly ridiculous, but masterful, stories to uphold what they know to be true due to the erroneous messages their damaged brain is sending their intact interpreter. One such patient believed the New York hospital where she was being treated was actually her home in Maine.

When her doctor asked how this could be her home if there were elevators in the hallway, she said, “Doctor, do you know how much it cost me to have those put in?” The interpreter will go to great lengths to make sure the inputs it receives are woven together to make sense—even when it must make great leaps to do so.

A little bit chilling isn't it? And yet another reason to view the merely articulate with scepticism. Talk really is cheap.

posted by Justin on 05.13.05 at 04:42 PM





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Comments

You ought to check out the book The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat. It's about bizarre disorders such as this, some of which are quite scary. (One woman literally lost all sense of touch overnight— she learned to walk again, and do other things, but she hasn't even got a sense of balance anymore, and is helpless in the dark.)

B. Durbin   ·  May 13, 2005 05:59 PM

I loved it. "An Anthropologist On Mars" is also terrific. Have you read it?

J. Case   ·  May 13, 2005 06:48 PM


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