BBC – Future – Why do some people have "two brains"?



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Look at your hands. Stick your thumb as if you were trying to hook one up with your right hand. Now, try to do the same thing with your left. Can you do it?

For some people, this task is not as easy as it may seem. Mike Gazzaniga, the "father of split brain syndrome," had studied a patient who had undergone a corpus callosotomy, a procedure that divides the brain into two parts to treat some forms of epilepsy. He found that the patient had difficulty treating the images based on their location in his field of vision.

When we see an image in our left eye, it is sent to the right side of the brain, and vice versa. The image is then sent to the dominant language center, left of the brain, to be transformed into something we understand. However, if a patient has had a callosotomy in his corpus, this path will be disrupted, leaving him unable to describe what he saw or able to follow the instructions of the right hand.

This research has helped to better understand how our brain is organized and whose capabilities are compartmentalized.

Learn more by watching the video above.

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