OK, so I'm finally getting around to reading a book I bought several months ago: The Happiness Hypothesis. I wrote a blog entry mentioning it a while back, and I've started to read it a couple of times, but I've finally made it past page 8. ...Yes, this is typical for me. I want knowledge, but I don't like to read. It's a sad dilemma.
Anyway, the first chapter has gone into human dichotomies and, as part of the exposition, an explanation of the right and left brains and studies done on patients whose corpus callosum had been severed or damaged and how they responded to...OK, I'll try to explain briefly. The author says a researcher would flash an image to the right or left of a dot the subject was asked to focus on. The images were flashed long enough to register in the brain but not long enough for the subject to take their eyes off of the dot to examine the image. If flashed on the right, the image was processed by the left hemisphere of the brain (because the light from the image entered the left side of the retina, yadda yadda yadda) which is responsible for language, and when asked what the image was, the subject would answer: for example, "hat". But if the image was flashed on the left, it was processed by the right half of the brain which has no language processing, so when asked what they saw, they answered, "Nothing." But if they were asked to point to which image they were shown on a piece of paper, they could point to it. Weird! Then, the researcher flashed two images simultaneously. One image was to the left of the dot, the other to the right. In one example, he flashed a chicken claw to the right and a snow-covered house and car to the left. When asked to point to which image corresponded with what they'd been shown, the subjects pointed to a chicken with their right hand and a shovel with their left. When asked why they chose what they did, they didn't answer, as one might expect, "I don't know why I'm pointing to the shovel. Must have something to do with what you showed my right brain." They answered that the chicken claw goes with the chicken, and the shovel was to clean out the chicken shed."
Wow. So essentially, the left brain interpreted the association the best it knew how by making up a connection. Granted, this phenomenon only applies to people whose left and right brain have been cut off from each other by brain damage or surgery, not to normal people, but I couldn't help but wonder how many quirks about people might be explainable if we only knew their brain make-up. Another example it gave was a school teacher who had a brain tumor and, quite suddenly, began propositioning young women randomly. When his tumor was removed, his behavior stopped. It was found that this tumor was interfering with portions of the brain which inhibit behaviors and process consequences. Can this happen on a more subtle level? Do some people have greater ability to predict the consequences of their actions? Do some have less inhibition because of brain activity or lack thereof? Are some more able to see themselves objectively than others?
On a related note, I also was fascinated, last week, by a fascinating interview on NPR about memory and our tendency to see and remember things within a framework that most makes sense given what we know within our current paradigms. One of my favorite parts, because we all know one of them, is the lady who called in saying her sister has a tendency to share other people's memories as her own:
In addition to the very personal, practical application of remembering that we all have our strengths and shortcomings and can't expect everyone to see or behave the same way, all of this has me really interested in the brain and its physiology in relation to emotion, psychology, and the rest of the body. I've been thinking a bit more about what I want to do with myself professionally, so I guess this is just sneaking in as a possible area of interest I had previously overlooked but which now seems kind of obvious... Now the question: is it too late for me to start into such an involved, specialized field? Ugh, maybe it's best as a point of interest rather than a possible career. I don't know. Have to look at it.
Incidentally, I found the following stories while trying to find the one above, and they look interesting, too:
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