Rand through a Nietzsche filter

[George H. Smith]

Thanks to WSS from me too for saving it. When I realized the thread was gone, I groaned "If I had known this was going to happen, I would have saved my reply to Janet regarding the film 'Rashomon' which centers on the question of "What is truth?".

So Bill's saving it saves me the work to write it again.

If this is the one you mean, it happens to be one I saved:

Janet;I was in the process

Submitted by Xray on Fri, 2012-02-17 21:08.

Janet;

I was in the process of editing my latest post, but as you replied during this time, I could not get the edited version through anymore:

Oh, Rashomon happens to be my favorite film! Its deeply philosophical topic is about "truth", or more precisely about "What is Truth?"

In the film, the truth about what happened is not revealed - we only have the 'eyewitnesses' to the killing (including the dead victim speaking from the 'beyond'!) telling the story from 'their' perspective, their motivation obviously being to present themselves in a favorable light.

But just because the truth about what happened is not revealed doesn't mean there is no truth. For example, the victim either committed suicide or not.

It is also because I have studied several true crime cases that Rashomon interests me.

There do exist unsolved criminal cases where the truth has not been found out - but this does of course not mean that this truth does not exist. Get my point?

The message of the film Rashomon is not that there is no truth - it deliberately leaves several possible scenarios open.

It also points out the complexity and intricacy of motives and directs the spectator to possible 'elements of truth' in each eyewitness's account.

Artistic license in fiction often 'plays' with our expectation regarding truth.

But in real life, the factual cannot be treated with as much license as in fiction, which is why a philosophy drawing its basis from fictional scenarios focusing on the distortion of reality will result in an epistemological trainwreck.

Also excellent is The Outrage (1964), starring Paul Newman. According to Wiki, Kurosawa is credited with the screenplay for this western remake of Rashomon. I haven't seen the original in many years, so I cannot say how similar the two films are, but The Outrage follows the same plot line.

I was born in Japan (Fukuoka, Kyushu), so I know about these things.

Ghs

[caroljane]

Thanks to WSS from me too for saving it. When I realized the thread was gone, I groaned "If I had known this was going to happen, I would have saved my reply to Janet regarding the film 'Rashomon' which centers on the question of "What is truth?".

So Bill's saving it saves me the work to write it again.

If this is the one you mean, it happens to be one I saved:

Janet;I was in the process

Submitted by Xray on Fri, 2012-02-17 21:08.

Janet;

I was in the process of editing my latest post, but as you replied during this time, I could not get the edited version through anymore:

Oh, Rashomon happens to be my favorite film! Its deeply philosophical topic is about "truth", or more precisely about "What is Truth?"

In the film, the truth about what happened is not revealed - we only have the 'eyewitnesses' to the killing (including the dead victim speaking from the 'beyond'!) telling the story from 'their' perspective, their motivation obviously being to present themselves in a favorable light.

But just because the truth about what happened is not revealed doesn't mean there is no truth. For example, the victim either committed suicide or not.

It is also because I have studied several true crime cases that Rashomon interests me.

There do exist unsolved criminal cases where the truth has not been found out - but this does of course not mean that this truth does not exist. Get my point?

The message of the film Rashomon is not that there is no truth - it deliberately leaves several possible scenarios open.

It also points out the complexity and intricacy of motives and directs the spectator to possible 'elements of truth' in each eyewitness's account.

Artistic license in fiction often 'plays' with our expectation regarding truth.

But in real life, the factual cannot be treated with as much license as in fiction, which is why a philosophy drawing its basis from fictional scenarios focusing on the distortion of reality will result in an epistemological trainwreck.

Also excellent is The Outrage (1964), starring Paul Newman. According to Wiki, Kurosawa is credited with the screenplay for this western remake of Rashomon. I haven't seen the original in many years, so I cannot say how similar the two films are, but The Outrage follows the same plot line.

I was born in Japan (Fukuoka, Kyushu), so I know about these things.

Ghs

Xray do you really like Rashomon better than 7 Samurai? I thought Germans were into horse operas!!

George, why did you not overthr

Thanks to WSS from me too for saving it. When I realized the thread was gone, I groaned "If I had known this was going to happen, I would have saved my reply to Janet regarding the film 'Rashomon' which centers on the question of "What is truth?".

So Bill's saving it saves me the work to write it again.

If this is the one you mean, it happens to be one I saved:

Janet;I was in the process

Submitted by Xray on Fri, 2012-02-17 21:08.

Janet;

I was in the process of editing my latest post, but as you replied during this time, I could not get the edited version through anymore:

Oh, Rashomon happens to be my favorite film! Its deeply philosophical topic is about "truth", or more precisely about "What is Truth?"

In the film, the truth about what happened is not revealed - we only have the 'eyewitnesses' to the killing (including the dead victim speaking from the 'beyond'!) telling the story from 'their' perspective, their motivation obviously being to present themselves in a favorable light.

But just because the truth about what happened is not revealed doesn't mean there is no truth. For example, the victim either committed suicide or not.

It is also because I have studied several true crime cases that Rashomon interests me.

There do exist unsolved criminal cases where the truth has not been found out - but this does of course not mean that this truth does not exist. Get my point?

The message of the film Rashomon is not that there is no truth - it deliberately leaves several possible scenarios open.

It also points out the complexity and intricacy of motives and directs the spectator to possible 'elements of truth' in each eyewitness's account.

Artistic license in fiction often 'plays' with our expectation regarding truth.

But in real life, the factual cannot be treated with as much license as in fiction, which is why a philosophy drawing its basis from fictional scenarios focusing on the distortion of reality will result in an epistemological trainwreck.

Also excellent is The Outrage (1964), starring Paul Newman. According to Wiki, Kurosawa is credited with the screenplay for this western remake of Rashomon. I haven't seen the original in many years, so I cannot say how similar the two films are, but The Outrage follows the same plot line.

I was born in Japan (Fukuoka, Kyushu), so I know about these things.

Ghs

Xray, do you really like Rashomon more than the 7 Samurai? I thought Germans were really into horse operas?

George, why did you not overthrow the Shogunate when you had the chance?

[George H. Smith]

George, why did you not overthrow the Shogunate when you had the chance?

My family moved from Japan shortly before my first birthday, and I had not yet become a fully trained Samurai at that point. However, as early photos of me will attest, I was waited on hand-and-foot by three beautiful Japanese women. (Economic conditions in post-war Japan were miserable, so even military personnel could afford to hire servants.)

Ghs

[Selene]

I'm glad too that anything Rashomon was saved. What a movie. I like Seven Samurai the best, but so enjoyed Ran also, is it all about japanese psychology, or just Kirosawa being a great moviemaker? I like Japanese movies, one of my faves was "Double Suicide" tho I don't know the director.

Double Suicide

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Double Suicide Directed by Masahiro Shinoda Produced by Masahiro Shinoda

Masayuki Nakajima Starring Kichiemon Nakamura

Shima Iwashita

Hosei Komatsu

Yusuke Takita

Kamatari Fujiwara Music by Tōru Takemitsu Cinematography Toichiro Narushima Release date(s) May 24, 1969

February 11, 1970 Running time 105 minutes Country Japan Language Japanese

Double Suicide (心中天網島 Shinjū: Ten no amijima^?) is a 1969 film directed by Masahiro Shinoda. It is based on the 1721 play The Love Suicides at Amijima by Monzaemon Chikamatsu. This play is often performed in the bunraku style (that is, with puppets). In the film, the story is performed with live actors, but also makes use of Japanese theatrical traditions such as the kuroko (stagehands dressed entirely in black) who invisibly interact with the actors, and the set is non-realist. The film opens with the preparations by the kuroko for a modern-day presentation of a puppet play while a voice-over is heard of someone, presumably the director, calling on the telephone to find a location for the penultimate scene of the lovers' suicide. Soon human actors are substituted for the puppets, and the action proceeds in a naturalistic fashion, until from time to time the kuroko intervene to accomplish scene shifts or heighten the dramatic intensity of the two lovers' resolve to be united in death.

The stylized sets and the period costumes and props simultaneously convey a classical theatricality and contemporaneous modernity. Jihei's fatal love interest, Koharu the prostitute, and his neglected wife, Osan, are both played by actress Shima Iwashita.

This film was released on DVD in Japanese with English subtitles in Region 1 on 30 January 2001.

[Selene]

The Magnificent Seven, one of the great westerns of all time was a remake of The Seven Samurai...

[william.scherk]

I saved the whole thread with the Firefox extension 'Scrapbook' and will put it up on the web in all its creaking glory (for aficionados of kook only). It tells us something about the "most open" forum that Lindsay promotes. Just remove the entire thing! That'll open things up ...

Oh, good. I'm glad you did that. I have copies of some of it, but I'd like to see how the whole discussion developed. There is a certain amount of philosophic interest to me in the back-and-forth between Angela and Janet. Plus there's a post (one which I copied) in which Janet describes some early perception research when she was a student. I'd like to find references to that research if any of it was published. I don't know if she said anything further about it elsewhere in the thread, since I didn't have time to read all the posts.

Ellen

I published a portion at my blog here, in a post "The most open Objectivish forum?" Only OL members have access to it. I will also post the entire thread in a blog post, if nobody minds. It is a bit fudgy in terms of format, but the road to inanity is clear ...

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

I will also post the entire thread in a blog post, if nobody minds.

William,

I thought of asking you not to do this on OL as I don't like the idea of the forum being used as a repository for leftovers from a hostile venue, but I reflected on it. My suggestion is to post it on a new thread in The Garbage Pile.

I believe that would satisfy the overlap tightrope of all the different vanities involved.

This is not a mandatory suggestion, of course. You are free to do as you wish. But if the thing later degenerates into a nasty mess, The Garbage Pile is probably where it would end up, anyway.

Michael

[caroljane]

I will also post the entire thread in a blog post, if nobody minds.

William,

I thought of asking you not to do this on OL as I don't like the idea of the forum being used as a repository for leftovers from a hostile venue, but I reflected on it and posting it on a new thread in The Garbage Pile is my suggestion.

I believe that would satisfy the overlap tightrope of all the different vanities involved.

Michael

I have read the latest installment of Janet's reports from Another Planet on Solo. She must be feared indeed. She commanded that nobody comment on her posts, and nobody has except our dauntless WSS.

I cannot understand what did, or might have happened to her wretched blog, but I think I can understand something about her. I am being serious. I don't think she is playing games, and whatever her psychology, I think her actual, medical state is one of paranoia, a state of which I have some knowledge.

She knows, absolutely, that someone or someones at OL hacked her and tried to ruin her computer; she has evidence of it which all fits together, and everything she thinks of, fits into the greater matrix. For example, two people in London are OL members. Furthermore, although this evidence has been concealed by the Great Coverup, one OL member is a South African and his daughter lives in London.

An OL enemy, who wants to kill her, has suggested that she contact her local police, but they are also her enemies and would just as soon kill her as not.

She is not clear why so many people want to kill her, but she knows they do, just as I know I am typing and eating a Vietnamese pork chop right now not quite simultaneously. Just as JN Schulman knows he met God.

In a paranoiac state people are utterly sincere, and in doing what they know they must do can be serenely, confidently, unbelievably manipulative and cunning. Often these are not even parts of their normal personalities.

I could be wrong of course, but I have come to this conclusion and I can't shake it off. If I am right I hope with all my heart that there are people in her life who can help her.

[9thdoctor]

Who on OL lives in London?

[Brant Gaede]

Who on OL lives in London?

The American werewolf.

--Brant

[caroljane]

Who on OL lives in London?

The American werewolf.

--Brant

Groany good , Brant. Here, you might as well have Janet's cupcake, since I have now called her crazy for real, I guess she will not come to the Play Nice Party, we will just have to eat them all ourselves.

[caroljane]

The Magnificent Seven, one of the great westerns of all time was a remake of The Seven Samurai...

Ran was a remake of King Lear. East-west cultural exchange!

[Selene]

Cannibals!

[Brant Gaede]

Cannibals!

Oh, c'mon. You've partaken of "long pig" too. We all have.

--Brant

except the Jews

[caroljane]

Xray, in case I was thoughtless, "horse opera" is old reviewspeak for "western movie", another such term is "standard oater".Your English is so fluent that I often forget it is not your first language and you might be puzzled by outdated slang or journalese. Hope you enjoy them anyway, as I do.

[caroljane]

Cannibals!

The cupcakes, Adam, not the guests. Stop cowering in that gully and put away that gun right now.

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

It's funny how the link in her signature still goes to the wrong blog.

Michael

[Selene]

Cannibals!

The cupcakes, Adam, not the guests. Stop cowering in that gully and put away that gun right now.

NEVER!! Cannibals!! Come and get me!!!!

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

I don't think she is playing games, and whatever her psychology, I think her actual, medical state is one of paranoia...

Carol,

I thought of that myself several times.

And here is another place where I thought of Janet. It is from a book I am currently reading called You Are Not So Smart: Why You Have Too Many Friends on Facebook, Why Your Memory Is Mostly Fiction, and 46 Other Ways You're Deluding Yourself by David McRaney. (It's a smart-ass title aimed at the popular market, but it deals with neuroscience, psychology and the different kinds of cognitive bias. And excellent, I might add.)

The quote is from Chapter 2 - Confabulation. I bolded the parts and made them blue that made me think of her.

But I think plain ole' garden-variety paranoia is what I mostly see. Even so, the split-brain thing is fascinating in its own right.

The last paragraph of the quote holds a special surprise for George Smith. What's worse, it's real, not made up.

To understand confabulation, we have to head into surgery. Every once in a while, in extreme cases where nothing else will work, doctors resort to splitting a patient’s brain right down the middle. And what they discover is fascinating.

To get a rough idea of how large and how halved your brain is, hold your hands out in front of you and form two fists. Now bring them together so that if you were wearing rings they would be facing upward. Each fist represents a hemisphere. Your two hemispheres communicate with each other via a dense series of nerve fibers called the corpus callosum. Imagine when you made those fists you grabbed two handfuls of yarn—the yarn is your corpus callosum. In a corpus callosotomy (which is sometimes performed when a case of epilepsy becomes so severe and unmanageable that no drug will bring relief and normalcy) that yarn is cut. The two halves of the brain are disconnected in a careful way that allows the patients to live out their lives with as much normalcy as possible.

Split-brain patients seem fine from the outside. They are able to hold down jobs and carry their weight in conversation. But researchers who have looked deeper have discovered the strengths and weaknesses of the separate hemispheres with the help of split-brain patients. Since the 1950s, studies with those who have undergone this procedure have revealed a great deal about how the brain works, but the insight most germane to the topic at hand is how quickly and unflinchingly these patients are capable of creating complete lies which they then hold to as reality. This is called split-brain confabulation, but you don’t have to have a split brain to confabulate.

You feel like a single person with a single brain, but in many ways, you really have two. Thoughts, memories, and emotions cascade throughout the whole, but some tasks are handled better by one side than the other. Language, for example, is usually a task handled by the left side of the brain, but then bounced back and forth between the two. Strange things happen when a person’s brain hemispheres are disconnected, making this transfer impossible.

Psychologist Michael Gazzaniga at the University of California at Santa Monica was one of the first researchers, along with Roger Sperry, to enlist the help of split-brain patients in his work. In one experiment subjects looked at a cross in the center of a computer screen, and then a word like “truck” was flashed on only the left side. They were then asked what they saw. Those with connected brains would, of course, say “truck.” Those with split brains would say they didn’t know, but then, amazingly, if they were asked to draw with their left hand what they had seen, they easily doodled a truck.

Oddly enough, your right hand is controlled by your left brain and your left hand by the right. What the left eye sees travels diagonally through the cranium into the right hemisphere and vice versa, and these nerves are not severed when the brains are split.

Normally this isn’t a problem, because what one side of the brain perceives and thinks gets transmitted to the other, but a split-brain can’t say what they see when a scientist shows an image to the left visual field. The language centers are in the other hemisphere, across from where the image is being processed. The part of their brain in charge of using words and sending them to the mouth can’t tell the other side, the one holding the pencil, what it is looking at. The side that saw the image can, however, draw it. Once the image appears, the split-brain person will then say, “Oh, a truck.” The communication that normally takes place across the corpus callosum now happens on the paper.

This is what goes on in the world of a split-brain patient. The same thing happens in your head too. The same part of your brain is responsible for turning thoughts into words and then handing those words over to the mouth. All day long, the world appearing in your right hemisphere is being shared with your left in a conversation you are unaware of. At the biological level, this is a fundamental source of confabulation, and it can be demonstrated in the lab.

If split-brain people are shown two words like “bell” on the left and “music” on the right and then asked to point out with their right hand in a series of four photos what they saw, they will point to the image with a bell in it. They will ignore other photos of a drummer, an organ, and a trumpet. The amazing confabulatory moment happens when they are asked why they chose the image. One split-brain patient said it was because the last music they heard was coming from the college’s bell towers. The left eye saw a bell, and told the right hand to point to it, but the right side saw music and was now concocting a justification for ignoring the other pictures that were also related to the idea.

The side of the brain in charge of speaking saw the other side point out the bell, but instead of saying it didn’t know why, it made up a reason. The right side was no wiser, so it went along with the fabrication. The patients weren’t lying, because they believed what they were saying. They deceived themselves and the researcher but had no idea they were doing so. They never felt confused or deceptive; they felt no different than you would.

In one experiment a split-brain person was asked to perform an action only the right hemisphere could see, and the left hemisphere once again explained it away as if it knew the cause. The word “walk” was displayed; the subject stood. When the researcher asked why he got up, the subject said, “I need to get a drink.” Another experiment showed a violent scene to only the right hemisphere. The subject said she felt nervous and uneasy and blamed it on the way the room was decorated. The deeper emotional centers could still talk to both sides, but only the left hemisphere had the ability to describe what was bubbling up. This split-brain confabulation has been demonstrated many times over the years. When the left hemisphere is forced to explain why the right hemisphere is doing something, it often creates a fiction that both sides then accept.

Remember though, your brain works in the same way—you just have the benefit of a connection between the two halves to help buffer against misunderstandings, but they can still happen from time to time. Psychologist Alexander Luria compared consciousness to a dance and said the left hemisphere leads. Since it does all the talking, it sometimes has to do all the explaining. Split-brain confabulation is an extreme and amplified version of your own tendency to create narrative fantasies about just about everything you do, and then believe them. You are a confabulatory creature by nature. You are always explaining to yourself the motivations for your actions and the causes to the effects in your life, and you make them up without realizing it when you don’t know the answers. Over time, these explanations become your idea of who you are and your place in the world. They are your self.

The neuroscientist V. S. Ramachandran once encountered a split-brain patient whose left hemisphere believed in God, but whose right hemisphere was an atheist. Essentially, as he put it, there were two people in one body—two selves.

This last paragraph of the quote above is dedicated to George. I imagine that would be his worst nightmare.

Michael

[caroljane]

Cannibals!

The cupcakes, Adam, not the guests. Stop cowering in that gully and put away that gun right now.

NEVER!! Cannibals!! Come and get me!!!!

Can't think of a good scene extension,, just laughing

God you make me laugh sometimes

[Brant Gaede]

I don't think she is playing games, and whatever her psychology, I think her actual, medical state is one of paranoia...

Carol,

I thought of that myself several times.

And here is another place where I thought of Janet. It is from a book I am currently reading called You Are Not So Smart: Why You Have Too Many Friends on Facebook, Why Your Memory Is Mostly Fiction, and 46 Other Ways You're Deluding Yourself by David McRaney. (It's a smart-ass title aimed at the popular market, but it deals with neuroscience, psychology and the different kinds of cognitive bias. And excellent, I might add.)

The quote is from Chapter 2 - Confabulation. I bolded the parts that made me think of her.

But I think plain ole' garden-variety paranoia is what I mostly see. Even so, the split-brain thing is fascinating in its own right.

The last paragraph of the quote holds a special surprise for George Smith. What's worse, it's real, not made up.

To understand confabulation, we have to head into surgery. Every once in a while, in extreme cases where nothing else will work, doctors resort to splitting a patient’s brain right down the middle. And what they discover is fascinating.

To get a rough idea of how large and how halved your brain is, hold your hands out in front of you and form two fists. Now bring them together so that if you were wearing rings they would be facing upward. Each fist represents a hemisphere. Your two hemispheres communicate with each other via a dense series of nerve fibers called the corpus callosum. Imagine when you made those fists you grabbed two handfuls of yarn—the yarn is your corpus callosum. In a corpus callosotomy (which is sometimes performed when a case of epilepsy becomes so severe and unmanageable that no drug will bring relief and normalcy) that yarn is cut. The two halves of the brain are disconnected in a careful way that allows the patients to live out their lives with as much normalcy as possible.

Split-brain patients seem fine from the outside. They are able to hold down jobs and carry their weight in conversation. But researchers who have looked deeper have discovered the strengths and weaknesses of the separate hemispheres with the help of split-brain patients. Since the 1950s, studies with those who have undergone this procedure have revealed a great deal about how the brain works, but the insight most germane to the topic at hand is how quickly and unflinchingly these patients are capable of creating complete lies which they then hold to as reality. This is called split-brain confabulation, but you don’t have to have a split brain to confabulate.

You feel like a single person with a single brain, but in many ways, you really have two. Thoughts, memories, and emotions cascade throughout the whole, but some tasks are handled better by one side than the other. Language, for example, is usually a task handled by the left side of the brain, but then bounced back and forth between the two. Strange things happen when a person’s brain hemispheres are disconnected, making this transfer impossible.

Psychologist Michael Gazzaniga at the University of California at Santa Monica was one of the first researchers, along with Roger Sperry, to enlist the help of split-brain patients in his work. In one experiment subjects looked at a cross in the center of a computer screen, and then a word like “truck” was flashed on only the left side. They were then asked what they saw. Those with connected brains would, of course, say “truck.” Those with split brains would say they didn’t know, but then, amazingly, if they were asked to draw with their left hand what they had seen, they easily doodled a truck.

Oddly enough, your right hand is controlled by your left brain and your left hand by the right. What the left eye sees travels diagonally through the cranium into the right hemisphere and vice versa, and these nerves are not severed when the brains are split.

Normally this isn’t a problem, because what one side of the brain perceives and thinks gets transmitted to the other, but a split-brain can’t say what they see when a scientist shows an image to the left visual field. The language centers are in the other hemisphere, across from where the image is being processed. The part of their brain in charge of using words and sending them to the mouth can’t tell the other side, the one holding the pencil, what it is looking at. The side that saw the image can, however, draw it. Once the image appears, the split-brain person will then say, “Oh, a truck.” The communication that normally takes place across the corpus callosum now happens on the paper.

This is what goes on in the world of a split-brain patient. The same thing happens in your head too. The same part of your brain is responsible for turning thoughts into words and then handing those words over to the mouth. All day long, the world appearing in your right hemisphere is being shared with your left in a conversation you are unaware of. At the biological level, this is a fundamental source of confabulation, and it can be demonstrated in the lab.

If split-brain people are shown two words like “bell” on the left and “music” on the right and then asked to point out with their right hand in a series of four photos what they saw, they will point to the image with a bell in it. They will ignore other photos of a drummer, an organ, and a trumpet. The amazing confabulatory moment happens when they are asked why they chose the image. One split-brain patient said it was because the last music they heard was coming from the college’s bell towers. The left eye saw a bell, and told the right hand to point to it, but the right side saw music and was now concocting a justification for ignoring the other pictures that were also related to the idea.

The side of the brain in charge of speaking saw the other side point out the bell, but instead of saying it didn’t know why, it made up a reason. The right side was no wiser, so it went along with the fabrication. The patients weren’t lying, because they believed what they were saying. They deceived themselves and the researcher but had no idea they were doing so. They never felt confused or deceptive; they felt no different than you would.

In one experiment a split-brain person was asked to perform an action only the right hemisphere could see, and the left hemisphere once again explained it away as if it knew the cause. The word “walk” was displayed; the subject stood. When the researcher asked why he got up, the subject said, “I need to get a drink.” Another experiment showed a violent scene to only the right hemisphere. The subject said she felt nervous and uneasy and blamed it on the way the room was decorated. The deeper emotional centers could still talk to both sides, but only the left hemisphere had the ability to describe what was bubbling up. This split-brain confabulation has been demonstrated many times over the years. When the left hemisphere is forced to explain why the right hemisphere is doing something, it often creates a fiction that both sides then accept.

Remember though, your brain works in the same way—you just have the benefit of a connection between the two halves to help buffer against misunderstandings, but they can still happen from time to time. Psychologist Alexander Luria compared consciousness to a dance and said the left hemisphere leads. Since it does all the talking, it sometimes has to do all the explaining. Split-brain confabulation is an extreme and amplified version of your own tendency to create narrative fantasies about just about everything you do, and then believe them. You are a confabulatory creature by nature. You are always explaining to yourself the motivations for your actions and the causes to the effects in your life, and you make them up without realizing it when you don’t know the answers. Over time, these explanations become your idea of who you are and your place in the world. They are your self.

The neuroscientist V. S. Ramachandran once encountered a split-brain patient whose left hemisphere believed in God, but whose right hemisphere was an atheist. Essentially, as he put it, there were two people in one body—two selves.

This last paragraph of the quote above is dedicated to George. I imagine that would be his worst nightmare.

Michael

George would love to argue with himself.

--Brant

blows may be struck!

[Selene]

Brant it would probably look like this...

[caroljane]

I don't think she is playing games, and whatever her psychology, I think her actual, medical state is one of paranoia...

Carol,

I thought of that myself several times.

And here is another place where I thought of Janet. It is from a book I am currently reading called You Are Not So Smart: Why You Have Too Many Friends on Facebook, Why Your Memory Is Mostly Fiction, and 46 Other Ways You're Deluding Yourself by David McRaney. (It's a smart-ass title aimed at the popular market, but it deals with neuroscience, psychology and the different kinds of cognitive bias. And excellent, I might add.)

The quote is from Chapter 2 - Confabulation. I bolded the parts that made me think of her.

But I think plain ole' garden-variety paranoia is what I mostly see. Even so, the split-brain thing is fascinating in its own right.

The last paragraph of the quote holds a special surprise for George Smith. What's worse, it's real, not made up.

To understand confabulation, we have to head into surgery. Every once in a while, in extreme cases where nothing else will work, doctors resort to splitting a patient’s brain right down the middle. And what they discover is fascinating.

To get a rough idea of how large and how halved your brain is, hold your hands out in front of you and form two fists. Now bring them together so that if you were wearing rings they would be facing upward. Each fist represents a hemisphere. Your two hemispheres communicate with each other via a dense series of nerve fibers called the corpus callosum. Imagine when you made those fists you grabbed two handfuls of yarn—the yarn is your corpus callosum. In a corpus callosotomy (which is sometimes performed when a case of epilepsy becomes so severe and unmanageable that no drug will bring relief and normalcy) that yarn is cut. The two halves of the brain are disconnected in a careful way that allows the patients to live out their lives with as much normalcy as possible.

Split-brain patients seem fine from the outside. They are able to hold down jobs and carry their weight in conversation. But researchers who have looked deeper have discovered the strengths and weaknesses of the separate hemispheres with the help of split-brain patients. Since the 1950s, studies with those who have undergone this procedure have revealed a great deal about how the brain works, but the insight most germane to the topic at hand is how quickly and unflinchingly these patients are capable of creating complete lies which they then hold to as reality. This is called split-brain confabulation, but you don’t have to have a split brain to confabulate.

You feel like a single person with a single brain, but in many ways, you really have two. Thoughts, memories, and emotions cascade throughout the whole, but some tasks are handled better by one side than the other. Language, for example, is usually a task handled by the left side of the brain, but then bounced back and forth between the two. Strange things happen when a person’s brain hemispheres are disconnected, making this transfer impossible.

Psychologist Michael Gazzaniga at the University of California at Santa Monica was one of the first researchers, along with Roger Sperry, to enlist the help of split-brain patients in his work. In one experiment subjects looked at a cross in the center of a computer screen, and then a word like “truck” was flashed on only the left side. They were then asked what they saw. Those with connected brains would, of course, say “truck.” Those with split brains would say they didn’t know, but then, amazingly, if they were asked to draw with their left hand what they had seen, they easily doodled a truck.

Oddly enough, your right hand is controlled by your left brain and your left hand by the right. What the left eye sees travels diagonally through the cranium into the right hemisphere and vice versa, and these nerves are not severed when the brains are split.

Normally this isn’t a problem, because what one side of the brain perceives and thinks gets transmitted to the other, but a split-brain can’t say what they see when a scientist shows an image to the left visual field. The language centers are in the other hemisphere, across from where the image is being processed. The part of their brain in charge of using words and sending them to the mouth can’t tell the other side, the one holding the pencil, what it is looking at. The side that saw the image can, however, draw it. Once the image appears, the split-brain person will then say, “Oh, a truck.” The communication that normally takes place across the corpus callosum now happens on the paper.

This is what goes on in the world of a split-brain patient. The same thing happens in your head too. The same part of your brain is responsible for turning thoughts into words and then handing those words over to the mouth. All day long, the world appearing in your right hemisphere is being shared with your left in a conversation you are unaware of. At the biological level, this is a fundamental source of confabulation, and it can be demonstrated in the lab.

If split-brain people are shown two words like “bell” on the left and “music” on the right and then asked to point out with their right hand in a series of four photos what they saw, they will point to the image with a bell in it. They will ignore other photos of a drummer, an organ, and a trumpet. The amazing confabulatory moment happens when they are asked why they chose the image. One split-brain patient said it was because the last music they heard was coming from the college’s bell towers. The left eye saw a bell, and told the right hand to point to it, but the right side saw music and was now concocting a justification for ignoring the other pictures that were also related to the idea.

The side of the brain in charge of speaking saw the other side point out the bell, but instead of saying it didn’t know why, it made up a reason. The right side was no wiser, so it went along with the fabrication. The patients weren’t lying, because they believed what they were saying. They deceived themselves and the researcher but had no idea they were doing so. They never felt confused or deceptive; they felt no different than you would.

In one experiment a split-brain person was asked to perform an action only the right hemisphere could see, and the left hemisphere once again explained it away as if it knew the cause. The word “walk” was displayed; the subject stood. When the researcher asked why he got up, the subject said, “I need to get a drink.” Another experiment showed a violent scene to only the right hemisphere. The subject said she felt nervous and uneasy and blamed it on the way the room was decorated. The deeper emotional centers could still talk to both sides, but only the left hemisphere had the ability to describe what was bubbling up. This split-brain confabulation has been demonstrated many times over the years. When the left hemisphere is forced to explain why the right hemisphere is doing something, it often creates a fiction that both sides then accept.

Remember though, your brain works in the same way—you just have the benefit of a connection between the two halves to help buffer against misunderstandings, but they can still happen from time to time. Psychologist Alexander Luria compared consciousness to a dance and said the left hemisphere leads. Since it does all the talking, it sometimes has to do all the explaining. Split-brain confabulation is an extreme and amplified version of your own tendency to create narrative fantasies about just about everything you do, and then believe them. You are a confabulatory creature by nature. You are always explaining to yourself the motivations for your actions and the causes to the effects in your life, and you make them up without realizing it when you don’t know the answers. Over time, these explanations become your idea of who you are and your place in the world. They are your self.

The neuroscientist V. S. Ramachandran once encountered a split-brain patient whose left hemisphere believed in God, but whose right hemisphere was an atheist. Essentially, as he put it, there were two people in one body—two selves.

This last paragraph of the quote above is dedicated to George. I imagine that would be his worst nightmare.

Michael

George would love to argue with himself.

--Brant

blows may be struck!

Oh, please stop, this thread is getting too good > St George vs the Dragon Atheist George... it is a "theme for Reason, too rich for poesy"

[caroljane]

The narrative continues.

Her private property was destroyed and acts of aggression committed against her , but she did not call in the police, instead superprofessional hackers who came and fixed it all for free.

If your best friends are professional Anonymous Internet Hackers, surely it is unwise to boast about it on a public forum?

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

Carol,

Are you familiar with remote viewing? And how about sonar equipment for long distance mind control?

Heh.

You would be surprised at all the covert resources I'm aiming at her.

The Internet stuff is just small potatoes and she's got it all wrong anyway. The trick is to get people to look at what you've got in one hand while you do the real deal with the other...

Not to mention my contacts in Homeland Security, the MOSSAD, and the secret dark informatics warfare arm of the Bilderberg group. (Sorry, I can't mention everything else--I've gone too far already...)

But I can say this. I've got a group of Brazilian Macumba people to sacrifice a herd of goats and 500 chickens in a three-day frenzy to send the whole damn hoard of spiritual entities to torture her sleep.

She ain't gonna wiggle out of that one, that's for sure.

How's them apples?

Michael