Get the latest tech news
One Head, Two Brains: The origins of split-brain research (2015)
How a radical epilepsy treatment in the early 20th century paved the way for modern-day understandings of perception, consciousness, and the self
In a paper he and a colleague published in the Journal of the American Medical Association in 1940, Van Wagenen explained his reasoning: He had developed the idea for the surgery after observing two epilepsy patients with brain tumors located in the corpus callosum. The patient Bogen had in mind was a man in his late forties named William Jenkins, a World War II veteran who had been hit in the head with the butt of a German officer’s rifle after parachuting behind enemy lines. Today’s therapies for seizures are more advanced than those of the mid-20th century, and split-brain surgery is now exceedingly rare —Michael Miller, a neuroscientist at the University of California at Santa Barbara who did graduate work with Gazzaniga, told me the last one he heard of was performed around 10 years ago.
Or read this on Hacker News
