| >The brain, or parts of it, are great at producing "explanations". I think that it was part of the more established and reproducible results of psychology that our brain first decides and acts, and only then produces some (often bullshit) "reason" when/if our conscious self asks for one? Does anybody remember if this is true and has a link? Relevant are Sperry & Gazzaniga's split brain experiments. Participants of these experiments had had their corpus callosum (one of the major "information" pathways between our brain's two halves) cut. This was an operation performed to keep epileptic seizures in check. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Split-brain In these participants, specific brain "functions" such as speech were highly lateralized, meaning only one half of the brain was able to perform it to a satisfying degree. Note that these were already not neuro-typical people prior to the experiments (given the regular, debilitating epileptic seizures), so reaching general conclusions from these experiments is hard. Remember also that, like our brains, our bodies are also highly lateralized, such that the right-half of our brain controls the left-side of our body, and the left-half of the brain controls the right-side of our body. If you ever wanted proof against intelligent design, the way our brain connects to our eyes & body is one very strong argument.. Anyway, one experiment stands to mind where one half of the brain was instructed to perform some action (move the left arm, or something similar). Then the other half would be asked _why_ that arm was just moved. It would confabulate, on the spot, totally legit, but obviously bullshit, sounding reasoning. E.g. "I felt cold so I wanted to put on a coat", rather than "the experimenter instructed me to move it". So, rather than claiming "I don't know", it would just make up a plausible reasoning. It is really unimaginable to _not_ know why you moved your arm.. |