Academic

Leonard on "The Interpreter" (and irrational behavior)

By Lawrence Solum

Adam Leonard has a very nice post entitled Explaining Irrational Behavior on Brains.  Here is a taste:

Michael S. Gazzaniga is a pioneering neuroscientist in split-brain research who is currently Director of the SAGE Center for the Study of the Mind at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His books for non-scientists, from /The Social Brain/ (1985) to /The Ethical Brain/ (2006), have allowed anyone with an interest to follow the fascinating and revealing research being conducted with patients whose brain hemispheres had to be ?split? (the connecting corpus callosum severed) to control life-threatening epilepsy.

The most intriguing ? and potentially momentous ? discovery arising from this research is not the much publicized left-brain, right-brain differences, but the uncovering of a function in the speaking hemisphere (usually the left-brain) that may prove instrumental to understanding Man?s recurring irrational behavior. The function, called the ?interpreter,? apparently generates conscious and implicitly believed ?rational? explanations for anything we do or feel in response to unconscious motivations.

Gazzaniga?s books describe how it is possible to provide information selectively to only the left (speaking) brain or the right (non-speaking) brain of a split-brain patient and monitor their responses. The startling discovery was that whenever the non-speaking brain was given a command to perform some action and the patient obeyed it, the speaking brain (which knew nothing of the command) would generate an explanation to explain the action ? and would believe the explanation truly /was/ the reason for the action.

Fascinating post.  I wonder what Adam Kolber thinks?

Full post as published by Legal Theory Blog on March 11, 2008 (boomark / email).