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Rupturewhich imagines a world where a person’s work and personal life are surgically separated, returns Friday for its long-awaited second season. While the concept of this gripping piece of science fiction is far-fetched, it touches on a question that neuroscience has been trying to answer for decades: Can a person’s mind really be split in two?
Surprisingly, there have been patients with “split brain” since the 1940s. To control epilepsy symptoms, these patients underwent surgery to separate the left and right hemispheres. Similar surgeries still happens today.
Later investigations on this type of surgery showed that the separate hemispheres of split-brain patients could process information independently. This raises the uncomfortable possibility that the procedure creates two separate minds living in one brain.
In the first season of RuptureHelly R (Britt Lower) experienced a conflict between her “innie” (the side of her mind that remembered her work life) and her “outie” (the side outside of work). Similarly, there is evidence of a conflict between the two hemispheres of real split-brain patients.
When talking to split-brain patients, you typically communicate with the left hemisphere of the brain, which controls speech. However, some patients can communicate from their right hemisphere by writing, for example, or arranging Scrabble letters.
a young patient in a studio He was asked what job he would like in the future. His left brain chose an office job doing technical drawings. His right hemisphere, however, arranged the letters to spell “car racer.”
Split-brain patients have also reported “alien hand syndrome”, where it is perceived that one of his hands moves of its own will. These observations suggest that two separate conscious “people” can coexist in one brain and have contradictory goals.
In RuptureHowever, both the inside and the outside have access to speech. This is an indicator that the fictitious “compensation procedure” must involve a more complex separation of brain networks.
An example of a complex separation of functions was described in Neil’s case report.in 1994. Neil was a teenager who had several difficulties after a pineal gland tumor. One of these difficulties was a rare form of amnesia. It meant that Neil could not remember the events of his day or report what he had learned at school. He had also become unable to read, although he could write, and could not name objects, although he could draw them.
Surprisingly, Neil was able to maintain his education. The researchers were interested in how he was able to complete his schoolwork despite not remembering what he was learning. They questioned him about a novel he was studying at school, Cider With Rosie by Laurie Lee. As he chatted, Neil couldn’t remember anything about the book, not even the title. But when a researcher asked Neil to write down everything he could remember about the book, he wrote “Geranium bloodshot cider with Rosie Dranium, dank peppar smell (sic) and mushroom growth,” all words related to the novel . Since Neil couldn’t read, he had to ask the researcher, “What did I write?”