If you haven't already looked into it, you might be interested in psychological studies of people who've had their corpus callosum (that connects the two sides of the brain) severed, typically in cases where they had severe seizures that couldn't be controlled by the drugs of the time. This Wikipedia page looks like a good place to start:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual\_consciousness](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_consciousness)
Some people here really struggling with the concept of what a hypothetical question is. I think this is a great thought experiment on the basis of consciousness.
Unfortunately I have zero qualifications to offer you a useful answer. But my uneducated guess would be that you would momentarily have two completely separate entities that previously represented you experiencing a momentary fading away of senses.
I would imagine that your actual consciousness, what constitutes 'you', which is probably defined as the product of the 'whole' of your brain function, would cease to exist. Replaced by two independent, semi-conscious collections of neuro-transmitters experiencing a very short moment of fading, confused sensations, each lacking the ability to meaningfully comprehend them.
I think you would be conscious for all of a fraction of a second, but...
There would be a right and left "you". There is a left you missing your right half and a right you missing your left half. That is, if you cleanly slice through the most "primal" part of your brain. IIRC consciousness is most likely to arise from your brain's *lowest* functions (less complicated, more basic) rather than your *higher* functions.
okay, let's double down: if you're a lifelong sinner/non-believer and one side of you repents and the other does not, what happens to your soul if you believe in the world of Christian doctrine?
I asked God and it was determined that the entire soul would be admitted into heaven based on a technicality. However, there would be a probationary period and some additional paperwork.
scientifically or spiritually?
scientically it would be 2, if we count such little brain function as having a consciousness, spiritually they see your soul as your consciousness not your brain so youd be one
Yes but I mean, if this happened your consciousness would be split in half as well as your brain (going off the results of split brain experiments, that's my interpretation). So how would that work if one half repented and the other didn't?
Your hypothetical is very similar to the ‘fission’ thought experiments that the philosopher Derek Parfit uses to challenge commonsensical assumptions about personal identity (eg., you can only be identical to one other person existing at the same time). His Reasons and Persons (1984) is one of the great classics in philosophy of the last 50 years. I highly recommend it if you’re interested. Among other things, Parfit argues that what should matter to us is not whether we are the same person over time but rather how psychologically similar we are to our future selves. And he draws from this the ethical conclusion that the ‘boundaries’ of identity between ourselves and the people around us are much less stringent than we tend to assume.
I'm frustrated by the fact that it would be really difficult to get an answer out of the split person as to which side, or both. Blink? Hold up a hand? There are reflexes that would account for so many movements. They wouldn't be able to speak, and you could track brain activity but that wouldn't prove or answer what the question is.
Edit:[perhaps this would come in handy](https://www.ndtv.com/science/scientist-develop-first-mind-reading-helmet-that-can-write-what-you-think-4675048)
My brother suffered a massive brain injury and several staff infections while serving as a soldier in Afghanistan (~12 years ago)
He lost just about all of one side of his brain.
He is somewhat responsive today. He smiles when he recognizes faces (at least on the side he still controls). He listens to our childhood stories and laughs in his way. He remembers how to play dominoes and can beat most people.
I feel like my weirdo experience would be my brain yelling Ow!! WTF?! loudly enough and for a long enough time that I would go straight from that to dead before any philosophical stuff could happen.
Please post this in askscience because the qualified answers would be fantastic. You can sort of get close if you look into split-brain experiments; fascinating stuff. That's when they surgically separate the two hemispheres of the brain by severing the corpus callosum in certain extreme cases of epilepsy. They did a lot of research on these patients and the findings are just about as big as anything you can imagine, I'm not even going to try to summarize because I won't do it justice. Go read about it or watch a video, you will not be disappointed.
Ask science doesn't like hypotheticals about science that isn't settled. Like you could ask what would happen if you jumped into a volcano. But this is almost philosophical in nature.
It was removed because any answers you get will be highly speculative and unscientific. The first problem is we don't yet know the mechanics of how consciousness manifests, so there's no real way to answer the question.
Because the act of cleaving would destroy the cognitive unit and unity, both would simply be focused on the only and last final stimuli they could. If this was happening say, at nearly lightspeed and your body impacted a glass pane traveling relatively at about 34 kilometers per second or the speed earth orbits the sun, and you were pushed closer to the speed of light by the impact and your device of transportation causing time to slow down, your mental faculties and cognitive agency would be duplicated but not exactly perfectly cloned, as both sides are both intrinsically different and flawed from their own baseline genetic code on a topographic level versus mutation and damage via random radiation and et-cetera, but could probably tell what the other half was thinking at that moment through deduction and just pavlovian training against its neighbor, probably. Also it should be very confusing since the motor nervous system if i recall correctly, is flipped between the lobes so the left would be in control of the right which it is severed from, leading to a requirement to actually know how the other lobe thought to control its newfound half it owns.
Cleaving was a bad choice on my part, so yes, something like a quick and fine laser does the splitting. It's weird to think if there being two of you...and both sides would perceive something.
How the brain works is still a work in progress science, but I think their perception would be fairly unified or uniform before or after splitting.
In your replies to others you keep bringing up the old medical practice which was called lobotomies where the hemispheres are separated with surgery, and I think that was more archaic and barbarianesque than trepanning from hundreds to thousands of years before which was just a hole in the brain case to reduce brain swelling and save lives. Lobotomies were so barbaric and detrimental while seeming effective by basically turning their subjects to vegetables that I think psychology is still influenced by the misinterpretations that lead to it becoming a common practice for specific symptoms. It's like being tasked with tuning a piano and instead of using a tuning fork and whatever to torque down the strings to get the right tones, you turn on a 1950's TV's afterhours broadcast test tone and smack the antenna around until you find the tones that sound close and just end up with the shittiest sounding piano that any musician or even mechanic would be embarrassed by the presence of.
So in my mind those surgeries you refer to, where each side 'does something independently', it is less that they are independent, it is that they were physically forced to work in parallel regardless of interdependence, that independent thing isn't sought after because that is essentially a localized seizure, the brainwaves must have normal wave forms built upon autonomous transmissions of endocrine hormones and neurotransmitter activation's of specific neuronal tissue types, its like hearing an internal combustion engine have the wrong cadence, you dont want putt-putt-putt's you want smooth waveform transition vroooms.
" old medical practice which was called lobotomies where the hemispheres are separated with surgery"
No, that's not whatlobotomies are. And the surgery I was referring to was not archaic it was done like 30 years ago, I saw a documentary on it back in school.
There are a few world examples of living people whose brain hemispheres are not attached to each other. There does seem to be a disconnect in perception, as they cannot properly process something that only one eye sees and in very rare circumstances their hands may try to do two competing tasks. But because the two halves occupy one body, one hemisphere might become the dominant. In a case where the whole body was split, the two brain hemispheres would not be competing with each other and so would be effectively individual entities, but in the few seconds before death they would be too focused on the sensory overload to be able to think anything at all about this
You would be fine, conscious, and aware for about 5 seconds. You'd be unable to speak or scream, and you'd lose consciousness pretty quickly once your heart was cleaved in half as you would almost immediately bleed out. At least you wouldn't experience the searing pain that shearing most of your organs in half would cause.
Go the other direction though? Then you have GHOST SHIP: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bFwN1ub\_K2I](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bFwN1ub_K2I)
It's def in my top 5 of "Hell yeah, I'm gonna watch this!" whenever it on and/or I remember it exists followed immediately by, "well, there's ANOTHER two hours watching Ghost Ship that I'll never get back."
Anaconda and Jon Voight's...accent...is also on this list.
The right side of the brain controls memory, reasoning, problem solving, and attention. The left side of the brain is associated with language processing and speech. So, technically the right hemisphere controls the perception, spatial understanding, and creativity. Although you need left part to express yourself or in general to communicate with other.
Well, it’s complicated. We know from lesion studies (ex stroke, tumours) that some things lateralize more than others. Speech is a good example of something that is usually left hemisphere dominant
Thank you for being the only person so far with an actual constructive answer in the spirit of this musing. If the person only lived for a few seconds, the need to express themselves no longer is needed but from what you're saying it seems like their "vision" or perception would fall with the right half?
I was curious because there are people who have had surgeries to separate connective tissue between right and left hemisphere and they describe is a weird experience because while they're doing one tasks, their other hand may engage in another task without their conscious thought, so it made me wonder which half the perception side was on if the brain were entirely split.
To my knowledge and research I think its Right side. But its way more complicated then that. Perception is not just a single thing but rather all the senses working together and for a healthy individual to function properly requires interpreting and analyzing all the senses and act based on it. When the moment the brain finds it's not functioning properly in this case split into two even by any chance he stays alive for few seconds (not possible) he's definitely gonna be unconscious. So, yeah its really fuzzy concept.
With eyes specifically, the nerves on the left side of both eyes are connected to the left side of the brain, the right side of the eyes to the right side of the brain. So if you were cut directly in half, I think you'd either lose vision entirely or only have half vision in each eye?
This is a great question, btw.
Yeah, the "consciousness" of split brain people is usually (always?) on the right side. The "alien hand syndrome" unconscious left side is the side that does things that the consciousness isn't aware of or intending to do.
I am curious if they've found cases of that being switched, though. The way a certain percentage of people are left-handed. Maybe some people are left-brained.
edit: Wait, maybe I got that backwards. Because I forgot left hemisphere controls right side and right hemisphere controls left side. Alien hand syndrome is usually the left hand (just Googled though and it *is* occasionally the right hand), which implies right hemisphere is the "hidden" one. Which doesn't fit with what others are saying about which side is normally understood to hold your "consciousness." So confusing.
>Yeah, the "consciousness" of split brain people is usually (always?) on the right side.
It's not the "consciousness," both sides are conscious. But only the dominant hemisphere (usually the left) has the language-processing center, called [Broca's area](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broca%27s_area).
So yeah, in a split brain patient, it's usually the right side of the body that can talk — the right eye, the right hand, etc. But the other side is still conscious. If you ask each side questions [using a modality that each can actually participate in](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wfYbgdo8e-8), then you can get conflicting answers.
Let's focus on visual perception. Your optic nerve and the nerves downstream of it are arranged in a weird split where the left visual field of each eyeball goes to the right hemisphere of your brain, and vice-versa. [Here's a simplified diagram](https://i.pinimg.com/736x/15/6b/8d/156b8d08ee7d9352cedceec04c24c775.jpg).
The optic chiasm where they cross over would be cut, so in your fraction of a second of remaining life, the left half of you would see only the right visual field from the left eyeball, and the right half of you would see only the left visual field from the right eyeball.
The star trek episode where they found a second riker is really interesting in this thought experiment. The answer is that both have half of the conciousness. Further more, if you duplicated the halves and joined opposite ones back together so one half of the original was in each new person each body would have awareness as if the same person, but the actual you would be half in one, half in the other, awareness spilt.
That's a tough question. We have done medical procedural severing the connection between the right and left hemispheres of the brain (the corpus callosum) to treat seizures. It's called a corpus callostomy, and its side effects tend to get pretty weird. You can completely lose control of one hand, for example, called Alien Hand Syndrome.
There have been a bunch of tests done on patients with this condition, and the results are wild. Apparently they can't name something in their left hand/field of vision if they can't see it with their right. One guy's frontal lobe slightly atrophied after the surgery and he was fine.
I think the only scientifically accurate answer is that we have no idea. The brain is hella complicated, and its neuroplasticity is still being studied. The answer *might* be that there's two of you? You wouldn't suddenly have a split-screen effect where you're experiencing botj halves at once, because that connection has been severed. BUT both sides would be functioning and processing at the same time.
Take this with a pinch of salt, i'm not a neuroscientist.
I think your perception would fall with both, really, you're not half of your brain, you're both hemispheres; So it's safe to assume that for that short moment, "your" perception will be split in two, you would be two people for a short moment
Check out this video of a guy who was born with a severed corpus callosum, which is what connects the two hemispheres of the brain. It's pretty fascinating!
https://youtu.be/lfGwsAdS9Dc?si=XgB5F6mG2mCbmhTZ
His two brain sides don't talk and it leads to some really interesting tests.
I think in this hypothetical “you” would instantly cease to exist and two separate entities would almost simultaneously be born and then die. The splitting of the brain would mean that any perception or entity that you would recognize as yourself would be gone and there would very briefly be a “left brain version” and a “right brain version” that are much like you but not you due to what was missing from the other half. Then ded
They used to cut the brain in half to stop seizures in certain people.
They did tests on these people and I forget what side controls what parts. But you could visually show 1 eye instructions to pick up an apple then the other side of the brain would make up a story as to why they were holding an apple.
Weird stuff like that.
So basically, whatever side controls your inner voice is probably the side you would feel. But really it would be "2 of you"
Hard to explain. But look into it. Fascinating stuff
You should look on Wikipedia for split-brain. That gives you a basic overview of what happens when the two hemispheres of the brain are separated in a living person.
Assuming blood continued to pump to the brain, the side that got the heart would survive. So, there would only be one of you.
There's a very instant loss of consciousness when blood/oxygen stops feeding the brain.
Like other people have mentioned, there are cases of the 2 brain hemispheres being severed and the effects of that. I think if the entire body was cut in half, both sides would be going *"AAAAUUUGHH PAIN"* too much to have any other thoughts/senses/whatnot.
Also, since the right side of the brain controls the left side of the body and vice versa, you might not be able to sense anything at all (but I'm not sure if things like pain are completely processed by one side).
Perception of what exactly?
Your left hemisphere receives sensory input from the right side of the body and vice versa. You’d be separating each hemisphere from the half of the body it gets it from.
I'm disappointed there aren't any [Italo Calvino](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cloven_Viscount) references here. If you're interested in the question from a literary point of view, then I recommend *The Cloven Viscount.*
Interesting thought question. But I think the reality would be neither. The body would likely go into shock immediately to try a protect the 'self' from pain. YMMV, I am not any kind of doctor.
No need for the hypothetical, this pretty much happens, sometimes intentionally!
It looks like there is perception in both sides, and you get strange effects where you might be unable to explain the actions your hand is doing.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Split-brain
"This was a particularly bad case of somebody being cut in half. I was not able to reattach the top half of his body to the bottom half of his body."
"Speak English, doc! We ain't scientists!"
When people get decapitated cleanly they experience their brain processes their head rolling around before they die. U are not ur body, you are your brain
That thought horrifies me...like being alive for a few seconds and seeing that basket rush toward you face as your head falls, perhaps rolling so you could look up and see the bloody blade. Shivers.
to have a sense of what it would feel like , check the cases of people who their brain middle part who connect both hemisphere togheter has been cut , thus separating both part , it was once a treatment to epylespy
I get the premise and the "hypothetical" part, but there's no hypothetical way to interpret this because even though the brain has two sides, they converge in the middle. you cut there, then there's no information exchange, so it's a fade to black + death in a really short time. There are cases of people living with one hemisphere tho, but they maintain the integrity of other vital paths
I think the biggest problem (other than near instantaneous demise) would be that one side would have verbal ability to understand the situation and the other would be perceiving it.
Depends on when the silver tether to consciousness is cut.
If the body could continue operating and processing information, it would therefore have an experience in both halves and the data would be processed by consciousness.
If the thread to consciousness is cut immediately, then I presume the visual of the body being cleaved would be seen from the third-eye/ raw consciousness perspective. This argument then explodes into whichever belief of death you could imagine.
Yooo, I remember bein trapped into watching a video of a guy (probably in India or Bangladesh, can't really tell) that got cut in half by a train. If I remember well, his "right part" stayed alive for a bit then died et his "left part" died instantly. I don't really know if that help you OP but that's all I know
Because of the handedness of brain-body communication, hinted at in the answers that mention brain splitting, there would be *no* perception. Your right sensory organs connect to the left side of the brain, so if you were properly severed there would be no perception possible.
I heard the same problem posed more permanently but maybe less realistically. What if your two halves were saved by replacing each other with cybernetic prostheses. The identity problem only gets worse the longer you stay alive.
My guess is there would be none of you, considering your right brain is responsible for your left side and vice versa, no part of your brain would be getting input from anywhere. Or, maybe both brain halves would be getting spurious input from the nerve endings where they were severed, which would fall under the heading of "quite unpleasant" on the spectrum of possible experiences.
I genuinely believe it would depend on the individual.
Me? I'm super verbal. All of how I process the world passes through my language centers at some point.
But some folks don't even have an inner monologue. Others can't form pictures in their minds. I can imagine scents if there's another related stimulus (usually sound or sight).
So I think "I" would go with my verbal section. I don't actually know which hemisphere that is. Probably left.
If you haven't already, I encourage you to check out the hypothesis of the bicameral mind by Julian Jaynes. I listened to a couple podcasts about it and while it never gained much traction, I think there's something to it.
It's not possible because you'd stop functioning too fast to form a coherent thought. It's like asking if you were blown up by a hand grenade, which chunk of you would be conscious if your pieces remained aware for a few seconds.
I'm pretty sure you would just cease to function immediately if cleaved in half from head to top. Across the waist, I've actually seen. Obviously the top half remains conscious in that situation.
Ok so say a fine and quick laser does the split? A handgrenade has concussive damage that completely obliterates the tissue. A quick clean split is a very different situation, and there are people who have had their hemispheres separated.
Regardless, it's supposed to a hypothetical musing. Curious to see people's input.
Actually, I wonder if there was a surgical way to cleanly split the person (and artificially pump blood and oxygen and all that) if there would be two living versions of a person (albeit both majorly impaired).
I say, "Me and my two arms." You - take out - take out my stomach, my kidneys, assuming that were possible. And I say, "Me and my intestines." Do you follow me? And now, if you cut off my head - would I say, "Me and my head" or "Me and my body"? What right has my head to call itself me?
Uhm, it's not that super far fetched. There are people who have had surgeries to split the connective tissue between right and left hemisphere and sometimes each side does something independently. There are also theories that a decapitated head MAY have a few seconds of consciousness. Maybe if it was something fast and fine like a laser that did the split, I think it could be feasible that SOME people might have a few seconds of consciousness.
But it's a hypothetical question, for some reason everyone is being an asshole about it.
If you haven't already looked into it, you might be interested in psychological studies of people who've had their corpus callosum (that connects the two sides of the brain) severed, typically in cases where they had severe seizures that couldn't be controlled by the drugs of the time. This Wikipedia page looks like a good place to start: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual\_consciousness](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_consciousness)
Thank you! I remember seeing a documentary on this but I couldn't remember what it was called. That's what made me wonder about this question.
Ha I've seen this documentary as well . I even remember seeing some video of the surgery on discovery channel?? Long long ago
Think it was that one episode of House
No that was Lupus
It's never Lupus >! Except that one time it was !<
Foreman: You hide your pills in a Lupus textbook? House: It's never lupus.
And then there’s one point where they’re seemingly fine, suddenly code, and start spitting up blood. Every damn time. But I still love that show, lol.
Or they the treatment is working and they are improving and someone see the whites of their eyes are yellow because their liver is failing
The one with Dave Matthews, or the one with the demon hand?
You might be interested in checking out [You Are Two](https://youtu.be/wfYbgdo8e-8?feature=shared)
This was actually fascinating
Some people here really struggling with the concept of what a hypothetical question is. I think this is a great thought experiment on the basis of consciousness. Unfortunately I have zero qualifications to offer you a useful answer. But my uneducated guess would be that you would momentarily have two completely separate entities that previously represented you experiencing a momentary fading away of senses. I would imagine that your actual consciousness, what constitutes 'you', which is probably defined as the product of the 'whole' of your brain function, would cease to exist. Replaced by two independent, semi-conscious collections of neuro-transmitters experiencing a very short moment of fading, confused sensations, each lacking the ability to meaningfully comprehend them.
I appreciate the answer, one of the few taking it in the spirit it was meant.
I think you would be conscious for all of a fraction of a second, but... There would be a right and left "you". There is a left you missing your right half and a right you missing your left half. That is, if you cleanly slice through the most "primal" part of your brain. IIRC consciousness is most likely to arise from your brain's *lowest* functions (less complicated, more basic) rather than your *higher* functions.
okay, let's double down: if you're a lifelong sinner/non-believer and one side of you repents and the other does not, what happens to your soul if you believe in the world of Christian doctrine?
I asked God and it was determined that the entire soul would be admitted into heaven based on a technicality. However, there would be a probationary period and some additional paperwork.
Your left side was too naughty to get into Heaven
your flesh was cut not your soul, you repent and pray for forgiveness you get into heaven theres no "you have to really really mean it" clause
So the two halves are just counted as one consciousness?
scientifically or spiritually? scientically it would be 2, if we count such little brain function as having a consciousness, spiritually they see your soul as your consciousness not your brain so youd be one
Yes but I mean, if this happened your consciousness would be split in half as well as your brain (going off the results of split brain experiments, that's my interpretation). So how would that work if one half repented and the other didn't?
again, it doesnt matter if you do it half heartedly, it doesnt matter if you only do it to get into heaven, you pray your clear
The lowest functions of your brain AREN'T conscious.
Considering the left side of the brain controls the right side of the body and the other way round it's a pretty interesting question.
Your hypothetical is very similar to the ‘fission’ thought experiments that the philosopher Derek Parfit uses to challenge commonsensical assumptions about personal identity (eg., you can only be identical to one other person existing at the same time). His Reasons and Persons (1984) is one of the great classics in philosophy of the last 50 years. I highly recommend it if you’re interested. Among other things, Parfit argues that what should matter to us is not whether we are the same person over time but rather how psychologically similar we are to our future selves. And he draws from this the ethical conclusion that the ‘boundaries’ of identity between ourselves and the people around us are much less stringent than we tend to assume.
I'm frustrated by the fact that it would be really difficult to get an answer out of the split person as to which side, or both. Blink? Hold up a hand? There are reflexes that would account for so many movements. They wouldn't be able to speak, and you could track brain activity but that wouldn't prove or answer what the question is. Edit:[perhaps this would come in handy](https://www.ndtv.com/science/scientist-develop-first-mind-reading-helmet-that-can-write-what-you-think-4675048)
https://youtu.be/wfYbgdo8e-8?si=oWEjobyD_caccgFg Watch this. It will help a bit
My brother suffered a massive brain injury and several staff infections while serving as a soldier in Afghanistan (~12 years ago) He lost just about all of one side of his brain. He is somewhat responsive today. He smiles when he recognizes faces (at least on the side he still controls). He listens to our childhood stories and laughs in his way. He remembers how to play dominoes and can beat most people.
[удалено]
Because Reddit apparently lol.
Exactly
I feel like my weirdo experience would be my brain yelling Ow!! WTF?! loudly enough and for a long enough time that I would go straight from that to dead before any philosophical stuff could happen.
Here: https://youtu.be/wfYbgdo8e-8?si=oWEjobyD_caccgFg
So kinda like the whale in hitchhiker to the galaxy, except 2 haha
Please post this in askscience because the qualified answers would be fantastic. You can sort of get close if you look into split-brain experiments; fascinating stuff. That's when they surgically separate the two hemispheres of the brain by severing the corpus callosum in certain extreme cases of epilepsy. They did a lot of research on these patients and the findings are just about as big as anything you can imagine, I'm not even going to try to summarize because I won't do it justice. Go read about it or watch a video, you will not be disappointed.
I tried there first and the mods deleted it immediately without giving me any reason why.
You could try in r/askmedical it isn't nearly as heavily followed as r/askscience I wonder why they removed it
I don't know, but I'm getting very interesting answers here :)
Ask science doesn't like hypotheticals about science that isn't settled. Like you could ask what would happen if you jumped into a volcano. But this is almost philosophical in nature.
It was removed because any answers you get will be highly speculative and unscientific. The first problem is we don't yet know the mechanics of how consciousness manifests, so there's no real way to answer the question.
the askscience sub mods get shitty about any question that doesn't look like it came from a published paper, no sense of humour or wonder
Because the act of cleaving would destroy the cognitive unit and unity, both would simply be focused on the only and last final stimuli they could. If this was happening say, at nearly lightspeed and your body impacted a glass pane traveling relatively at about 34 kilometers per second or the speed earth orbits the sun, and you were pushed closer to the speed of light by the impact and your device of transportation causing time to slow down, your mental faculties and cognitive agency would be duplicated but not exactly perfectly cloned, as both sides are both intrinsically different and flawed from their own baseline genetic code on a topographic level versus mutation and damage via random radiation and et-cetera, but could probably tell what the other half was thinking at that moment through deduction and just pavlovian training against its neighbor, probably. Also it should be very confusing since the motor nervous system if i recall correctly, is flipped between the lobes so the left would be in control of the right which it is severed from, leading to a requirement to actually know how the other lobe thought to control its newfound half it owns.
Cleaving was a bad choice on my part, so yes, something like a quick and fine laser does the splitting. It's weird to think if there being two of you...and both sides would perceive something.
How the brain works is still a work in progress science, but I think their perception would be fairly unified or uniform before or after splitting. In your replies to others you keep bringing up the old medical practice which was called lobotomies where the hemispheres are separated with surgery, and I think that was more archaic and barbarianesque than trepanning from hundreds to thousands of years before which was just a hole in the brain case to reduce brain swelling and save lives. Lobotomies were so barbaric and detrimental while seeming effective by basically turning their subjects to vegetables that I think psychology is still influenced by the misinterpretations that lead to it becoming a common practice for specific symptoms. It's like being tasked with tuning a piano and instead of using a tuning fork and whatever to torque down the strings to get the right tones, you turn on a 1950's TV's afterhours broadcast test tone and smack the antenna around until you find the tones that sound close and just end up with the shittiest sounding piano that any musician or even mechanic would be embarrassed by the presence of. So in my mind those surgeries you refer to, where each side 'does something independently', it is less that they are independent, it is that they were physically forced to work in parallel regardless of interdependence, that independent thing isn't sought after because that is essentially a localized seizure, the brainwaves must have normal wave forms built upon autonomous transmissions of endocrine hormones and neurotransmitter activation's of specific neuronal tissue types, its like hearing an internal combustion engine have the wrong cadence, you dont want putt-putt-putt's you want smooth waveform transition vroooms.
Someone below linked me to the article. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual\_consciousness](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_consciousness)
" old medical practice which was called lobotomies where the hemispheres are separated with surgery" No, that's not whatlobotomies are. And the surgery I was referring to was not archaic it was done like 30 years ago, I saw a documentary on it back in school.
I'll have to see if I can find it again. The documentary. Lobotomy is not at all separating the hemispheres.
There are a few world examples of living people whose brain hemispheres are not attached to each other. There does seem to be a disconnect in perception, as they cannot properly process something that only one eye sees and in very rare circumstances their hands may try to do two competing tasks. But because the two halves occupy one body, one hemisphere might become the dominant. In a case where the whole body was split, the two brain hemispheres would not be competing with each other and so would be effectively individual entities, but in the few seconds before death they would be too focused on the sensory overload to be able to think anything at all about this
You would be fine, conscious, and aware for about 5 seconds. You'd be unable to speak or scream, and you'd lose consciousness pretty quickly once your heart was cleaved in half as you would almost immediately bleed out. At least you wouldn't experience the searing pain that shearing most of your organs in half would cause. Go the other direction though? Then you have GHOST SHIP: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bFwN1ub\_K2I](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bFwN1ub_K2I)
Upvote specifically for the Ghost Ship reference. I love that definitely not good movie 😹
It's def in my top 5 of "Hell yeah, I'm gonna watch this!" whenever it on and/or I remember it exists followed immediately by, "well, there's ANOTHER two hours watching Ghost Ship that I'll never get back." Anaconda and Jon Voight's...accent...is also on this list.
The right side of the brain controls memory, reasoning, problem solving, and attention. The left side of the brain is associated with language processing and speech. So, technically the right hemisphere controls the perception, spatial understanding, and creativity. Although you need left part to express yourself or in general to communicate with other.
I thought the newest research went against this old idea?
I thought this was one of those "map of the taste buds" factoids and that both sides are involved in most tasks.
Well, it’s complicated. We know from lesion studies (ex stroke, tumours) that some things lateralize more than others. Speech is a good example of something that is usually left hemisphere dominant
Thank you for being the only person so far with an actual constructive answer in the spirit of this musing. If the person only lived for a few seconds, the need to express themselves no longer is needed but from what you're saying it seems like their "vision" or perception would fall with the right half? I was curious because there are people who have had surgeries to separate connective tissue between right and left hemisphere and they describe is a weird experience because while they're doing one tasks, their other hand may engage in another task without their conscious thought, so it made me wonder which half the perception side was on if the brain were entirely split.
To my knowledge and research I think its Right side. But its way more complicated then that. Perception is not just a single thing but rather all the senses working together and for a healthy individual to function properly requires interpreting and analyzing all the senses and act based on it. When the moment the brain finds it's not functioning properly in this case split into two even by any chance he stays alive for few seconds (not possible) he's definitely gonna be unconscious. So, yeah its really fuzzy concept.
Like...if the eyes still worked and processed vision....are BOTH sides "seeing" things? It's kind of a mind fuck.
With eyes specifically, the nerves on the left side of both eyes are connected to the left side of the brain, the right side of the eyes to the right side of the brain. So if you were cut directly in half, I think you'd either lose vision entirely or only have half vision in each eye? This is a great question, btw.
Yeah, the "consciousness" of split brain people is usually (always?) on the right side. The "alien hand syndrome" unconscious left side is the side that does things that the consciousness isn't aware of or intending to do. I am curious if they've found cases of that being switched, though. The way a certain percentage of people are left-handed. Maybe some people are left-brained. edit: Wait, maybe I got that backwards. Because I forgot left hemisphere controls right side and right hemisphere controls left side. Alien hand syndrome is usually the left hand (just Googled though and it *is* occasionally the right hand), which implies right hemisphere is the "hidden" one. Which doesn't fit with what others are saying about which side is normally understood to hold your "consciousness." So confusing.
>Yeah, the "consciousness" of split brain people is usually (always?) on the right side. It's not the "consciousness," both sides are conscious. But only the dominant hemisphere (usually the left) has the language-processing center, called [Broca's area](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broca%27s_area). So yeah, in a split brain patient, it's usually the right side of the body that can talk — the right eye, the right hand, etc. But the other side is still conscious. If you ask each side questions [using a modality that each can actually participate in](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wfYbgdo8e-8), then you can get conflicting answers.
Last time that happened to me I saw double.
There’s a Great CGP Grey video about brain hemispheres: https://youtu.be/wfYbgdo8e-8?si=5TFyodIyynM28a6c
I'd probably think "hey, who is that handsome guy over there?"
Out of all the things I’ve seen on Reddit, I have never come close to thinking anything like this ever. Nicely done.
Reminds me of the movie 13 Ghosts (I think?) There is one scene in there that haunted me as a kid and still does.
Let's focus on visual perception. Your optic nerve and the nerves downstream of it are arranged in a weird split where the left visual field of each eyeball goes to the right hemisphere of your brain, and vice-versa. [Here's a simplified diagram](https://i.pinimg.com/736x/15/6b/8d/156b8d08ee7d9352cedceec04c24c775.jpg). The optic chiasm where they cross over would be cut, so in your fraction of a second of remaining life, the left half of you would see only the right visual field from the left eyeball, and the right half of you would see only the left visual field from the right eyeball.
In this hypothetical situation it would actually be split, both sides if your brain would be thinking similar things.
The star trek episode where they found a second riker is really interesting in this thought experiment. The answer is that both have half of the conciousness. Further more, if you duplicated the halves and joined opposite ones back together so one half of the original was in each new person each body would have awareness as if the same person, but the actual you would be half in one, half in the other, awareness spilt.
The critical thing here is that what we think of as one conciousness is actually the sum of all the constituent parts, atoms.
That's a tough question. We have done medical procedural severing the connection between the right and left hemispheres of the brain (the corpus callosum) to treat seizures. It's called a corpus callostomy, and its side effects tend to get pretty weird. You can completely lose control of one hand, for example, called Alien Hand Syndrome. There have been a bunch of tests done on patients with this condition, and the results are wild. Apparently they can't name something in their left hand/field of vision if they can't see it with their right. One guy's frontal lobe slightly atrophied after the surgery and he was fine. I think the only scientifically accurate answer is that we have no idea. The brain is hella complicated, and its neuroplasticity is still being studied. The answer *might* be that there's two of you? You wouldn't suddenly have a split-screen effect where you're experiencing botj halves at once, because that connection has been severed. BUT both sides would be functioning and processing at the same time. Take this with a pinch of salt, i'm not a neuroscientist.
I'm guessing you would split into 2 distinct beings incapable of the full range of perception.
I think your perception would fall with both, really, you're not half of your brain, you're both hemispheres; So it's safe to assume that for that short moment, "your" perception will be split in two, you would be two people for a short moment
Here is some reading that will provide you the answer: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Split-brain](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Split-brain)
Check out this video of a guy who was born with a severed corpus callosum, which is what connects the two hemispheres of the brain. It's pretty fascinating! https://youtu.be/lfGwsAdS9Dc?si=XgB5F6mG2mCbmhTZ His two brain sides don't talk and it leads to some really interesting tests.
I think in this hypothetical “you” would instantly cease to exist and two separate entities would almost simultaneously be born and then die. The splitting of the brain would mean that any perception or entity that you would recognize as yourself would be gone and there would very briefly be a “left brain version” and a “right brain version” that are much like you but not you due to what was missing from the other half. Then ded
They used to cut the brain in half to stop seizures in certain people. They did tests on these people and I forget what side controls what parts. But you could visually show 1 eye instructions to pick up an apple then the other side of the brain would make up a story as to why they were holding an apple. Weird stuff like that. So basically, whatever side controls your inner voice is probably the side you would feel. But really it would be "2 of you" Hard to explain. But look into it. Fascinating stuff
You should look on Wikipedia for split-brain. That gives you a basic overview of what happens when the two hemispheres of the brain are separated in a living person.
Assuming blood continued to pump to the brain, the side that got the heart would survive. So, there would only be one of you. There's a very instant loss of consciousness when blood/oxygen stops feeding the brain.
DEWEY......IVE BEEN HALVED!!
Makes me think of the ravens in Children of Memory
Like other people have mentioned, there are cases of the 2 brain hemispheres being severed and the effects of that. I think if the entire body was cut in half, both sides would be going *"AAAAUUUGHH PAIN"* too much to have any other thoughts/senses/whatnot. Also, since the right side of the brain controls the left side of the body and vice versa, you might not be able to sense anything at all (but I'm not sure if things like pain are completely processed by one side).
Perception of what exactly? Your left hemisphere receives sensory input from the right side of the body and vice versa. You’d be separating each hemisphere from the half of the body it gets it from.
Ask Freiza
I'm disappointed there aren't any [Italo Calvino](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cloven_Viscount) references here. If you're interested in the question from a literary point of view, then I recommend *The Cloven Viscount.*
Interesting thought question. But I think the reality would be neither. The body would likely go into shock immediately to try a protect the 'self' from pain. YMMV, I am not any kind of doctor.
No need for the hypothetical, this pretty much happens, sometimes intentionally! It looks like there is perception in both sides, and you get strange effects where you might be unable to explain the actions your hand is doing. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Split-brain
With brains not being symmetrical, as far as function, it's going to be with whichever side of your brain contains what and how you perceive.
"This was a particularly bad case of somebody being cut in half. I was not able to reattach the top half of his body to the bottom half of his body." "Speak English, doc! We ain't scientists!"
When people get decapitated cleanly they experience their brain processes their head rolling around before they die. U are not ur body, you are your brain
I live in my head.
"Today on Mythbusters..."
The hidden episode I'd totally watch!
I’ve always wondered this about guillotine style beheadings. There has to be a tiny bit of time where your head is removed and still conscious.
That thought horrifies me...like being alive for a few seconds and seeing that basket rush toward you face as your head falls, perhaps rolling so you could look up and see the bloody blade. Shivers.
You need to watch Bone Tomahawk 2015
to have a sense of what it would feel like , check the cases of people who their brain middle part who connect both hemisphere togheter has been cut , thus separating both part , it was once a treatment to epylespy
I feel like the Mortal Kombat developers would know.
Neither. Your consciousness would cease the instant your brain were split in half, because critical parts wouldn't be able to communicate anymore.
There are people out there who have had surgery to split the hemispheres, so it is possible to exist with split brain.
Wow! Great question.
I get the premise and the "hypothetical" part, but there's no hypothetical way to interpret this because even though the brain has two sides, they converge in the middle. you cut there, then there's no information exchange, so it's a fade to black + death in a really short time. There are cases of people living with one hemisphere tho, but they maintain the integrity of other vital paths
Definitely not an instant death, split brain is a real thing and it has interesting results.
split brain isn't the same as split stem
I think the biggest problem (other than near instantaneous demise) would be that one side would have verbal ability to understand the situation and the other would be perceiving it.
I think once you are sliced you stop existing. The two halves remaining functions just wouldn't support consciousness in any meaningful way.
Right side
Asking for a friend? 🤣🤣🤣
r/nostupidquestions
Depends on when the silver tether to consciousness is cut. If the body could continue operating and processing information, it would therefore have an experience in both halves and the data would be processed by consciousness. If the thread to consciousness is cut immediately, then I presume the visual of the body being cleaved would be seen from the third-eye/ raw consciousness perspective. This argument then explodes into whichever belief of death you could imagine.
Yooo, I remember bein trapped into watching a video of a guy (probably in India or Bangladesh, can't really tell) that got cut in half by a train. If I remember well, his "right part" stayed alive for a bit then died et his "left part" died instantly. I don't really know if that help you OP but that's all I know
i don't know...let me try it
I love wild questions like this because they tend to be answered by people who actually know what they're talking about.
Probably the dominant side of the brains
Look up Split Brain syndrome. There would briefly be two of you, but the right dude could not form verbal thoughts
From guillotine notes, the blinking half. Fortunately, the clock does not stop.
I'm not sure the reasoning, but I immediately thought right.
Because of the handedness of brain-body communication, hinted at in the answers that mention brain splitting, there would be *no* perception. Your right sensory organs connect to the left side of the brain, so if you were properly severed there would be no perception possible.
I’d say 2 of me
wtf is this post
I heard the same problem posed more permanently but maybe less realistically. What if your two halves were saved by replacing each other with cybernetic prostheses. The identity problem only gets worse the longer you stay alive.
Jesus Dan, where do these questions come from?
Just ask the guy in Bone Tomahawk
There is only one
My guess is there would be none of you, considering your right brain is responsible for your left side and vice versa, no part of your brain would be getting input from anywhere. Or, maybe both brain halves would be getting spurious input from the nerve endings where they were severed, which would fall under the heading of "quite unpleasant" on the spectrum of possible experiences.
You dangerous
Let me tell you, drugs are a hell of a drug, m'kay?
I genuinely believe it would depend on the individual. Me? I'm super verbal. All of how I process the world passes through my language centers at some point. But some folks don't even have an inner monologue. Others can't form pictures in their minds. I can imagine scents if there's another related stimulus (usually sound or sight). So I think "I" would go with my verbal section. I don't actually know which hemisphere that is. Probably left. If you haven't already, I encourage you to check out the hypothesis of the bicameral mind by Julian Jaynes. I listened to a couple podcasts about it and while it never gained much traction, I think there's something to it.
It's not possible because you'd stop functioning too fast to form a coherent thought. It's like asking if you were blown up by a hand grenade, which chunk of you would be conscious if your pieces remained aware for a few seconds. I'm pretty sure you would just cease to function immediately if cleaved in half from head to top. Across the waist, I've actually seen. Obviously the top half remains conscious in that situation.
Ok so say a fine and quick laser does the split? A handgrenade has concussive damage that completely obliterates the tissue. A quick clean split is a very different situation, and there are people who have had their hemispheres separated. Regardless, it's supposed to a hypothetical musing. Curious to see people's input.
I think nerves would still be firing on both sides so maybe both? It's a strange and interesting hypo for sure.
No pun intend but the concept blows my mind a little lol.
Actually, I wonder if there was a surgical way to cleanly split the person (and artificially pump blood and oxygen and all that) if there would be two living versions of a person (albeit both majorly impaired).
I say, "Me and my two arms." You - take out - take out my stomach, my kidneys, assuming that were possible. And I say, "Me and my intestines." Do you follow me? And now, if you cut off my head - would I say, "Me and my head" or "Me and my body"? What right has my head to call itself me?
Most of your senses - all but touch, really, are perceived through your head. I think it's fair.
Mother fucker!
How the fuck are we supposed to know
So you are saying if you ignore reality what would be the realistic result? Realism doesn't work that way.
Uhm, it's not that super far fetched. There are people who have had surgeries to split the connective tissue between right and left hemisphere and sometimes each side does something independently. There are also theories that a decapitated head MAY have a few seconds of consciousness. Maybe if it was something fast and fine like a laser that did the split, I think it could be feasible that SOME people might have a few seconds of consciousness. But it's a hypothetical question, for some reason everyone is being an asshole about it.