Selfie: How the West Became Self-Obsessed

by Will Storr

know they were there, it couldn’t ‘tell’ its owner about them. This is how it worked: they would angle pictures and videos in a specific way towards the patient’s left eye and then, because of the way in which the brain’s wired up, the images of those pictures and videos would travel into the patient’s right hemisphere. But because their right hemisphere had no inner voice it couldn’t say, for example, ‘It’s a photo of a chicken,’ and so the patient would have no conscious idea that they’d seen anything, let alone a photo of a chicken. If a man’s right hemisphere was shown a picture of a hat, say, he would deny having seen anything at all – but then be alarmed when his left hand (which, of course, is controlled by his right hemisphere), suddenly began pointing at a hat, apparently of its own volition. This actually happened.