Notes from Maine - 2022/03/20
This morning, when I was stretching—getting out of bed—a deep growling sound came out of my mouth. I don’t make this sound every morning, sometimes it happens and sometimes it doesn’t. As I sat there, getting ready to start the day, it occurred to me that I must have been a little kid the first time I made this sound. The very first time I heard a sound like that, it came from my own mouth. Would that have been frightening? I can’t remember.
There are so many things we learn about the world around us that nobody can explain beforehand. Nobody could describe the smell of a lilac—you just have to experience it to understand. For some, it’s amazing. Other people don’t care for it. These interactions with our senses are completely individual. So I thought about the first time that growling sound came out of my mouth and wondered, “What did I think? Was I scared?”
Even now, the sound seems unnatural. Fear would be a reasonable response. Maybe there’s something wrong with my lungs or my throat? But I realized that I probably just told myself, “It must be natural.”
We’re in the middle of a gruesome mud season here right now. My morning chores involve slogging through mud nearly up to my knees. The mud sucked at my boots, I dragged my cart, and wondered how I reassured myself. In my thoughts, who was explaining, and who was hearing that explanation? I did some reading and found out that not everyone hears an internal monologue (or dialogue) in their heads. Some people simply have inner thoughts that don’t express themselves as speech.
I once had a dog with severe epilepsy. While I was researching treatment, I found that some humans underwent “corpus callosotomy” where the two halves of the brain are disconnected to prevent seizures from jumping (this procedure is very rare now). There were some odd results observed when disconnecting the left and right hemispheres of the brain. People developed “alien hand syndrome” where their left and and right hands seemed to sometimes be at odds with each other. One hand would go to perform a task and the other hand would reach to undo it.
Experiments with split-brain patients paint a picture of at least two conscious entities living inside us. The two halves coordinate, but also have a decent amount of individual control over the left and right sides of our bodies. One side processes sensory input, and the other is responsible for speech.
When I was a kid, explaining to myself the world around me, was it one consciousness inside me explaining to the other? Maybe the hemisphere tasked with visual and auditory input was comforting the hemisphere in charge of running away?
I once heard an interview with a suicidal person and they said, “I just can’t live with myself anymore.” I couldn’t stop thinking about that. Who is the “I” and who is “myself”? Was one part of their brain trying to disconnect while the other was arguing and desperate to hold on? When we speak, just one part of us has the controls, but maybe the sentiments behind what we say are coming from the other half. They’re just twisted by an internal game of telephone.
Here’s a description of one of the split-brain experiments done (excerpt from Wikipedia):
A series of pictures was placed in front of the patients. Gazzaniga and LeDoux then asked the patient to choose a picture with his right hand and a picture with his left hand. The paradigm was set up so the choices would be obvious for the patients. A snow shovel is used for shoveling the snowy driveway of the winter house and a chicken's head correlates to the chicken's claw. The other pictures do not in any way correlate with the 2 original pictures. In the study, a patient chose the snow shovel with his left hand (corresponding to his brain's right hemisphere) and his right hand chose the chicken's head (corresponding to the brain's left hemisphere). When the patient was asked why he had chosen the pictures he had chosen, the answer he gave was “The chicken claw goes with the chicken head, and you need a snow shovel to clean out the chicken shed”.
I wonder what would happen if we could give a true voice to that other part of ourselves. Maybe I would finally find out why I sometimes make that growling sound when I stretch in the morning. With any luck, when the mud finally dries up outside, I’ll stop thinking about it so much.
