Modern neuroscience has provided strong support for the suspicion that the self is not the ‘thing’ that we imagine it to be – that there is, in the words of the neuropsychologist Paul Broks, no ‘centre in the brain where things do all come together’. One good illustration of this emerges from experiments involving patients with ‘split brains’ – people in whom the corpus callosum, which connects the left and right hemispheres of the brain, has been severed. As the psychologist Michael Gazzaniga has demonstrated, ‘split-brain’ people behave as if each of their hemispheres were its own
...more
