There is this expression I catch myself using more and more as time goes on, and I felt it applies to many areas of living with a mind nowadays:
“split-brain answer”
There is this medical condition, called split-brain syndrome. Look it up, but you won’t, so you may just keep reading for the shorter gist:
Basically, patients that had their ‘corpus callosum’ (the area separating the left-right brain hemispheres), severed by accidents (or sometimes even intentionally, to prevent some rare forms of stroke or epilepsy) exhibit something called ‘split-brain’ behavior.
How does it manifest?
Basically, your left ‘you’ generated by the left part of the brain does not communicate with the right ‘you’ part of the brain, hence making weird disconnects between left-right eyesight, or left-right arm movements, and oddities of the sort.
We ‘healthy’ people have an auto-sync feature between the two parts. They don’t.
Examples and stories are easiest, so here is one:
One such patient, was under a cheeky experiment of a doctor. The experiment consisted in having a dividing panel between left and right eye of the patient. On the left side of the panel, where only the left eye could see (connected to the right brain hemisphere), there was a message: “WALK”
The other hemisphere, the left one, connected to the right eye, could not see the message. The left hemisphere also, is by natural evolved design the hemisphere that is usually tasked with processing words and speech.
The patient stood up.
The doctor, being cheeky, played stupid.
“Why are you getting up?” he asks
The split-brain patient, engaging his ‘verbal’ circuitry, starts looking for an explanation.
“I don’t know, I was just a bit thirsty. I’m going to grab some water.”
That’s why brain scientists colloquially refer to the left brain hemisphere as the ‘balloney generation’ part of the brain. Speech is like that.
The role of speech is not mathematical rigour, it’s a social role.
However, this effect doesn’t happen just to split-brain patients. This happens to all of us, you and me, all the time, most of the time unknowingly.
Whenever someone asks
“So, why did you do this?”
“How did you achieve this?”
“What was your motivation?”
The person answering will basically go into his ‘mind’ drawer to concoct a quick answer, of the readily available kind.
“Oh, you know, because <insert first thing that happened to be on my mind here>”
And as many times the question is asked, almost all of the times the answer will be a lie.
No explanation will be the true explanation of what actually caused the thing. Just the most readily available thought the pertains to the subject.
Why?
Two things:
Almost no effect has a single cause
We don’t know shit
For simple and mechanical things, there might be one single majority cause that contributes to the effect, but that stops being the case the more complex the domain you venture in.
And even if the cause is clear-cut and singular. Or you find the top 5 causes that contribute to one observed effect 99%, how do you know you are ‘right’?
You don’t. You improvise.
Unless you ran some rigorous experiments and you really understand at a deep level what you are talking about, and what are the fundamental mechanics at play here, you don’t know. You opine.
I have played in improv theatre for about 2-3 years (one of the few things I missed during corona times) and if there is one thing that I learned about the inner mechanisms of my mind is that I don’t know shit, and I make stuff on the fly.
‘I’ being the mind speaking.
The explanation we come up with are improvisation sessions. They are true only out of luck or deliberate and careful examination. But by default, they are wrong.
Armed with this new understanding, maybe you will catch yourself doing this as well.
Of course, never believe a word I say. You have your own experience to look to.
And maybe, just maybe, you will catch yourself thinking of the words
‘split-brain answer’
As the chatter goes its way.