Split Brain???

Classes here at good ol' U of A have been okay so far this semester... pretty simple and self-explanitory. However, my favorite class I have this semester is Introduction to Psychology. I just find it really interesting, thinking about... well, thinking. So far, we've mostly just talked about the physical aspects, parts of the brain, and what they do and such. Well, today, we talked about the weirdest thing I've heard of for a while. Y'see, there's this condition that people can get called "split brain", where the corpus collosum (the series of nerves connecting your left and right brain) gets cut, so the hemispheres of your brain can't communicate with eachother. Apparently they used to do it back in the 60s to people who had serious epilepsy problems, and they still do a revised version of it nowadays.

These people with a "split brain" act pretty normal... untill you test them. They have this test where they have the subject focus on a point in the middle of a screen, and show them slides of different words and objects. If the word "Science" is flashed where the vision field of the right eye is, the subject can repeat back the word no problem, because the right eye sends information to the left brain, where speech and verbal communication is generally handled. If the same word is flashed in the vision field of the left eye, the subject will not be able to repeat back what he or she saw, because the right brain generally cannot control speech. Crazy, huh?

HOWEVER, if a picture of a cow is flashed to the left eye, the subject IS able to pick up a stuffed cow out of a selection of objects, or draw a cow on paper. The body just won't be able to verbalize it. Which just freaks me out, it's like your mind having a mind of it's own... or something. Another really interesting test had two different words showed on each side of the screen: The left side showed the word "TOAD", and the left showed the word "STOOL". The man was able to say the word stool, obviously, but when given a piece of paper, he had to actually guess what his hand was drawing, in this case, a toad, to figure out the whole word TOADSTOOL. Isn't that just crazy??? It weirds me out.

As freaky as I find all of this stuff, it really fascinates me for one reason or another. I'm thinking about maybe exploring what sort of careers you can get into. Getting a career in psychology DOES sound a little fishy to me... like I'd feel weird getting a career in something that seems so... guessy, but at this point, it's all just spectulative, anyway. I'm WAY too indecisive to decide yet... But, hey, maybe I'll learn about what part of my brain makes me so indecicive soon?

-Jimmy