balanco01{at}yahoo.com (Proprclr) wrote in news:ccknah$mvi$1
{at}darwin.ediacara.org:

> I've always wondered what would happen if the left and right halves
> of the human body were completely seperated, and somehow kept alive.
> What would conciousness be like? Would the new "beings"
still perecieve
> themselves as one person, or two different entities? I've heard of people
> living with literaly half of a brain, and I was wondering just how
> self-awareness would work when a person is halved.


There are a number of individuals who have had the connection between the 
right and left halves of the brain cut. Because in humans the two halves 
serve somewhat different functions, for the most part these people still 
have only one "self", that of the dominant half. But there can be some 
interesting consequences, such as the "alien hand" effect:

"One woman whose brain had been surgically split found, for example, that 
it often took her hours to get dressed in the morning because her alien 
hand kept trying to dictate what she should wear. Time and again she would 
reach out with her right hand and select an item from the wardrobe, only to 
see her left hand whip up and grab something else. Once her left hand had 
got hold of something it would not let go, and she, of course, had no way 
of making it obey her conscious will." 

The quote is from Rita Carter's "Mapping the Mind", which has a whole 
chapter on right brain/left brain differences.

Yours,

Bill Morse
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