Misattributed arousal is the idea that when our nervous system is stimulated or excited—when our blood pressure goes up and our heart beats faster—the left-brain interpreter will make up a story about the origin of this arousal, and often that story is completely wrong. In exactly the same way that the left brain of a split-brain subject creates a theory to explain reality (“you need a shovel for the chicken coop”), these studies have demonstrated that even people who still have intact communication between the two hemispheres create erroneous stories when it comes to unexplained arousal. That
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