Transcription
So, um, now let's go to get to the neurology. And one of the, one of the group, one group of patients we have studied is split-brain patients or common serotonin patients. These are people whose corpus callosum has been cut, and anterior commissure and mass intermedia whenever encountered. So, essentially you're taking, doing a karate chop right through the head and creating two human beings in one body, in one skull; two spheres of consciousness.
Now, many experiments have been done on these people, and I asked myself a very simple question: Okay, you've created two people here, what about their personalities? Do they have different personalities? What about their aesthetic preferences? Does one like blondes and the other like brunettes, for example? One like chocolate and the other like vanilla? What happens?
So we tried these experiments, and what we did was we had to first train the right hemisphere to communicate with us. In fact, the right hemisphere can read simple commands, simple words, simple sentences. And then you ask a question and say, "Point to a box: yes, no, I don't know," because it can't talk. But the atmosphere cannot talk, but it can comprehend simple semantics, simple questions. Left chemistry, of course, can talk, so you can present boxes: yes, no, I don't know. So we asked, for example, "Are you at Caltech?" And the right hemisphere pointed to yes. "Are you on the moon?" It said no. "Are you, uh, are you in California?" Said yes. "Are you asleep?" I said no. Then I said, "Are you a woman?" And the patient was male, and he pointed to yes and then started chuckling and laughing. So at least the right hemisphere has a sense of humor. Okay, okay.
So now comes the big question: What if you ask, "Do you believe in God?" So I said, "Do you believe in God?" And the right hemisphere went straight to yes. Right? It has the same question to the left and say yes, no, I don't know. It went to no, right? So here's a human being whose right hemisphere is an atheist and left, on the other hand, believes in God. And this finding should have sent a tsunami through the theological community, but barely produced a ripple because it raises all kinds of profound theological questions. If this person dies, what happens? There's one hymn; does one hemisphere go to heaven and the other go to hell? I don't know the answer to that.