I recently read a philosopher arguing for there being two minds in the brain because, in some patients who have their corpus callosum severed (so called split-brain), to treat epilepsy, for example, there appears to be a division of will in which the left and right sides of the body are controlled separately. But this conclusion is aberrant thinking because severing the corpus callosum amounts to major brain damage. The results of major brain damage cannot be normalised and generalised.
It is not apparent that healthy brains experience this kind of duality. Most of the popular myths about the different roles of the different hemispheres of the brain turn out to be untrue. There may be some division of labour, the brain is nothing if not modular, but our minds are a result of the whole brain. The aberrations that occur with brain injury certainly give us insights into the architecture of the brain and then the contributions different areas make to our minds.
However, the routine over-simplification and essentialisation of observations means that most of what we read about the brain in popular media is wrong. It turns out that men are not "from Mars" and women are not "from Venus". Both sides of the brain have a limbic system, and many emotions are correlated with activity in the cerebellum, which is not divided. Blah blah.
People with agendas consume science news in a biased way. This is religious thinking: one comes to a conclusion then amasses evidence to support that conclusion, filtering out evidence that contradicts one's conclusion. Scientific thinking counters this in two ways. Firstly, it tries to make explicit what would constitute a refutation of a view, so that when a refutation comes along it is easily recognised. Secondly, it tries to weigh the evidence before coming to a conclusion, and then to keep looking at new evidence.
It is not apparent that healthy brains experience this kind of duality. Most of the popular myths about the different roles of the different hemispheres of the brain turn out to be untrue. There may be some division of labour, the brain is nothing if not modular, but our minds are a result of the whole brain. The aberrations that occur with brain injury certainly give us insights into the architecture of the brain and then the contributions different areas make to our minds.
However, the routine over-simplification and essentialisation of observations means that most of what we read about the brain in popular media is wrong. It turns out that men are not "from Mars" and women are not "from Venus". Both sides of the brain have a limbic system, and many emotions are correlated with activity in the cerebellum, which is not divided. Blah blah.
People with agendas consume science news in a biased way. This is religious thinking: one comes to a conclusion then amasses evidence to support that conclusion, filtering out evidence that contradicts one's conclusion. Scientific thinking counters this in two ways. Firstly, it tries to make explicit what would constitute a refutation of a view, so that when a refutation comes along it is easily recognised. Secondly, it tries to weigh the evidence before coming to a conclusion, and then to keep looking at new evidence.
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