You Are Not So Smart: Why You Have Too Many Friends on Facebook, Why Your Memory Is Mostly Fiction, and 46 Other Ways You're Deluding Yourself Read Online Free PDF

out with their right hand in a series of four photos what they saw, they will point to the image with a bell in it. They will ignore other photos of a drummer, an organ, and a trumpet. The amazing confabulatory moment happens when they are asked why they chose the image. One split-brain patient said it was because the last music they heard was coming from the college’s bell towers. The left eye saw a bell, and told the right hand to point to it, but the right side saw music and was now concocting a justification for ignoring the other pictures that were also related to the idea.
    The side of the brain in charge of speaking saw the other side point out the bell, but instead of saying it didn’t know why, it made up a reason. The right side was no wiser, so it went along with the fabrication. The patients weren’t lying, because they believed what they were saying. They deceived themselves and the researcher but had no idea they were doing so. They never felt confused or deceptive; they felt no different than you would.
    In one experiment a split-brain person was asked to perform an action only the right hemisphere could see, and the left hemisphere once again explained it away as if it knew the cause. The word “walk” was displayed; the subject stood. When the researcher asked why he got up, the subject said, “I need to get a drink.” Another experiment showed a violent scene to only the right hemisphere. The subject said she felt nervous and uneasy and blamed it on the way the room was decorated. The deeper emotional centers could still talk to both sides, but only the left hemisphere had the ability to describe what was bubbling up. This split-brain confabulation has been demonstrated many times over the years. When the left hemisphere is forced to explain why the right hemisphere is doing something, it often creates a fiction that both sides then accept.
    Remember though, your brain works in the same way—you just have the benefit of a connection between the two halves to help buffer against misunderstandings, but they can still happen from time to time. Psychologist Alexander Luria compared consciousness to a dance and said the left hemisphere leads. Since it does all the talking, it sometimes has to do all the explaining. Split-brain confabulation is an extreme and amplified version of your own tendency to create narrative fantasies about just about everything you do, and then believe them. You are a confabulatory creature by nature. You are always explaining to yourself the motivations for your actions and the causes to the effects in your life, and you make them up without realizing it when you don’t know the answers. Over time, these explanations become your idea of who you are and your place in the world. They are your self.
    The neuroscientist V. S. Ramachandran once encountered a split-brain patient whose left hemisphere believed in God, but whose right hemisphere was an atheist. Essentially, as he put it, there were two people in one body—two selves. Ramachandran believes your sense of self is partly the action of mirror neurons. These complex clusters of brain cells fire when you see someone hurt themselves or cry, when they scratch their arm or laugh. They put you in the other person’s shoes so you can almost feel that person’s pain and itches. Mirror neurons provide empathy and help you learn. One of the greatest discoveries in recent years was to find that mirror neurons fire also when you do things. It is as if part of your brain is observing yourself as an outsider.
    You are a story you tell yourself. You engage in introspection, and with great confidence you see the history of your life with all the characters and settings—and you at the center as protagonist in the tale of who you are. This is all a great, beautiful confabulation without which you could not function.
    As you move through your day, you imagine a wide range of potential futures, potential situations outside your senses.