Alien Hand, the Kangaroo Joke, the Happy go-lucky Judge

[Mike Dubbeld]

The subconscious mind is the right cerebral hemisphere (ususally). It is like a separate identity we have. It is a slave to the conscious mind but strives to make itself known in subtle ways.


The text below is from Rita Carter in her very interesting book ‘Mapping the Mind’. She lists numerous references to the experiments and episodes in her book but I did not include them below. Since she published it and it was so successful, she has followed up with her even newer book 'Exploring Consciousness.'

Happy go lucky Judge

‘Patients with bad right-brain damage, by contrast, sometimes appear to be entirely unmoved by it, maintaining an optimistic, what-the-hell sanguinity in the face of what would otherwise be quite dreadful suffering. In the most extreme cases they refuse to recognize their shortcomings at all. A very senior American judge is said to have caused huge embarrassment after a severe right-brain stroke because he insisted on continuing at the bench despite having lost his ability to weight evidence in anything like a sensible way. He maintained an exceptionally jolly courtroom, happily allowing serious criminals to go free while occasionally dispatching minor offenders to lifelong prison sentences. He resisted his colleagues’ attempts to persuade him to retire and was finally sacked. Thanks to his right brain damage he seemed perfectly content – if puzzled –by this turn of events, and subsequently enjoyed a long and happy retirement.’

Kangaroo Joke

‘Despite the irrepressible jollity of an unopposed left brain it takes the combination of the both hemispheres to produce a fully rounded sense of humor. Consider a fairly standard joke: a kangaroo walks into a bar, sits down and asks for a pint of beer. The barman, astonished, gives the kangaroo his drink. ‘How much?’ asks the animal. The barman, recovering his composure, decides to see if the kangaroo is really as clever as it seems. Winking knowingly at his human customers, he names an exorbitantly high price. The kangaroo pays it, and the barman, reassured of the continuing superiority of his own species, relaxes.

‘Don’t get many kangaroos in here,’ he remarks casually…. Now, here are 3 possible punchlines: (a) Then the kangaroo gets out a gun and shoots the barman. (b) Then the man on the next stool admits that he is a ventriloquist who has trained the kangaroo to drink beer. (c) ‘I’m not surprised,’ replies the kangaroo, ‘with beer at that price.’ Punchline (c) might seem the obvious choice –but a person with a right brain lesion would be quite likely to pick the literal and – to most people humorless – option of (b). Left brain-damaged patients, on the other hand, may chose (a) – a seemingly arbitrary surprise ending.’

‘The difference is probably because the left brain creates the feeling of amusement and so is quite happy to laugh at more or less anything when prompted – rather like the epileptic girl (p11) who laughed at the surgeons when part of her left hemisphere was stimulated on the operating table. Hence, ordinary situations, with no ‘twist’, may be seen as jokes if presented as such. The right hemisphere is the one that ‘gets’ the joke, in that it registers the dislocation in logic that is a hallmark of most formal humor. This is a mild form of alert – a ‘something is not quite right here!’ effect that, on its own, is not funny at all. In fact, it is a mild form of fear.

Someone equipped only with this right-brain ability might well think that any surprise ending makes a joke. The combination of (right-brain) alert and (left-brain) jollity is still not enough to make something funny – humor also needs meaning in order to work. This is why seeing a nice-looking person slipping on a banana skin is not funny but watching a pompous bully come a cropper [to be struck by misfortune/fall headlong] is. Meaning emerges from the pulling together of all the threads of a joke, including context, assumptions and knowledge of our own prejudices. Humor is a diffuse, fuzzy sort of thing – a matter of taste, often, and something you don’t expect to find even the most sophisticated computer unless it has been programmed in by a human.’

[The left brain is responsible for language and laughter. It puts an explanation to understanding that happens in the right hemisphere (subconscios).]

Alien Hand

‘Another patient had a hand that insisted on pulling down his trousers immediately after his other hand had pulled them up. A third found his alien hand unbuttoned his shirt as fast as his other hand could fasten it. M.P., the woman whose hand chucked un-cracked eggs into her omelette, had to put half a day aside to pack when she went away because here alien hand would systematically remove each item from her suitcase just after she put it in.’

‘Most alien hands are merely irritating or comical ‘It feels like having 2 naughty children inside my head who are always arguing,’ said M.P. Occasionally, though, alien hands seem to be intent on more than mischief. One man reported reaching out with his right hand to give his wife a hug, only to see his right hand fly up and punch her instead. M.P., too, sometimes found her alien hand would prevent her other hand from making affectionate gestures—her husband was often subjected to a tug-of-war as one hand reached out to embrace him while the other pushed him away.’ p50

Rita has since come out with another book that deals directly with the subject of consciousness -- 'Exploring Consciousness.' From what she has said, Mapping the Mind is in keeping with yogic ideas. It is a physical brain type of book.

I would say more but one of my hands refuses to type……

Mike Dubbeld

[Gehirnnecken]

What kind of brain damage causes an alien hand? It's quite scary to think what damage something like that could do.

[kyman]

Isn't it the structure that connects the two hemispheres?

[Mike Dubbeld]

Originally Posted by kyman

Isn't it the structure that connects the two hemispheres?

Thats what the 'ladder of heaven' is in neuroscience Kyman. The corpus callosum. The small band that connects the 2 hemispheres of the brain. The subconscious is subjective/wave and does pattern recognition by analog means/holographic means. When a pattern is identified in the subconscious, 'understanding' happens and the left hemisphere/conscious mind reads the lable off the storage bin the understanding was had so to speak. This storage bin contains all the facts that the mind has accumulated in memory associated with the phenomena. Understanding is had in the subconsccious/right hemisphere. An explanation is provided by the left hemisphere (language and laughter). The conscious mind operates in digital fashion. Something either is or is not true. Something is or is not a dog. Words must be slapped on patterns to particularize a pattern into some form of reality by the conscious mind so as to be able to convey meaning to another mind.

It goes a lot further than this. There is 'plasticity' of the brain. The ability of the 2 hemispheres to communicate with each other. Men are predominantly left-brained (pingala) and women right-brained (ida). Intuition (communication by the soul with the mind) comes through the right hemisphere. Women are naturally more intuitive than men. Men are naturally more intellectual than women. The pingala is the 'heady agressive mode'. What a man may arrive at by discursive logic a woman may arrive at without even bothering with that by intuition.

Some people have trouble with communication between the spheres such that they are literally 'stuck' in one sphere or another. That is why you find all the 'prove its' on these forums - something is not true unless and until their left hemisphere has logical proof. That's one reason I am always talking about Godel. Most things that are true cannot be proven. Most things we know are not true by proof. Thus there is whole boatloads that are cut off from the right hemisphere for purposes of intuition and operate on the surface in an ostensible/shallow reality. People that don't have this problem are at a complete loss to understand these people but the people that have the problem band together defensively. I call them 'logical literal idiots.'

Piracetam is a prescription drug in the US specifically for improving cross-hemisphere communication. But in Europe it is over-the-counter. I talked about this once on a science forum and to my surprise, someone sent me a personal email thanking me very much and how much their thinking had improved since they started taking Piracetam. But what they really wanted to know is if I knew of any OTHER great drugs that work that good. (there are and if anyone wants to know more about it just do a search on 'cognitive' and 'nootropic' and 'CERI' or 'Brain Longevity' and 'Dharma.' The neurotransmitter chemical mix in our brains is very important and if it is imbalanced can cause depression and other things. (I'd like to kick Tom Cruise butt for his misinformation/scientolgy crap).

There's also a less-known connection between the hemispheres called the anterior commissure but it is most often associated with the limbic system. But while that is true, the lines between conscious and unconscious become blurred in yoga as a yogi can control the organs in his body consciously to a much greater degree - including and especially parts of the brain. I can control my thyroid, heart, pituitary and pineal gland as well as CSF (Cerebrospinal Fluid) specifically, I can pump CSF consciously.

Conscious control of the heart is no longer a mystery it is done by the right vagus nerve which is independent/separate of the spine and under conscious control. Waves in the mind can also be controlled to control headaches as you know and produce alpha waves which are often confused with as being samadhi. These waves (alpha/beta/theta and delta) are very important in yoga and more critical to understanding the brain than neuroscience dabblers know.

Mike Dubbeld

[Mike Dubbeld]

Originally Posted by Gehirnnecken

What kind of brain damage causes an alien hand? It's quite scary to think what damage something like that could do.

'Alien hands ['intermanual conflict'] arise in people who have suffered injury to one or both of 2 brain areas: One is an area called the supplementary motor area (SMA), a strip of cortex on top of the brain and to the front of the area that controls movement. The other is the corpus callosum. SOme people with alien hands, like women with the culinary problems above, have had a haemorrhage or stroke. Most of the cases, however, involve people who have undergone split brain surgery. [like for epsilepsy to prevent the seizure from affecting the other hemisphere and causing death]

The book has several bizarre stories of alien hand in it. Here is more on how the right and left cerebral cortex are like 2 different people--

'The human brain is a marriage of 2 minds. Each of its twin hemispheres is a physical mirror image of the other, and if one hemisphere is lost early in life, the other may take over and fulfil the functions of both. Normally, though, the 2 are bound together by a band of fibre that conveys a continuous, intimate dialogue between them. Information arriving in one half is almost instantly avialiable to the other and their responses are so closely harmonized that it produces an apparently seamless perception of the world and a single stream of consciousness.'

'Separate these hemispheres, however, and the differences between them become apparent. Each half of a mature brain has its own strengths and weakness; its own way of processing information and its own speical skills. They might even exist in two distinct realms of consciousness: 2 individuals, effectively, in one skull.' p34 (Caption)

'Most sensory input to the brain crosses over from the incoming side to the opposite hemispher for processing. Once the information enters one hemisphere it is sent on to the other via the corpus callosum. A. Visual input from the left half of each eye goes to the right hemisphere and vice versa. B. Apart from certain facial nerves, the neural pathways from the body also end up in the opposite side of the brain. C. Most auditory input is processed on the opposite side of the brain to the ear through which it enters. D. Smell is the exception to the cross-over rule--odors are processed on the same side as the nostril that senses them.' p35 (caption)

'The right hemisphere is also good at grasping wholes, while the left brain likes detail. Other right-brain strengths include the ability to make out camoflaged images against a complex background to see patterns at a glance. This could well have had important survivial benefits when our ancestors needed to watch for predators. The left, by contrast, is good at breaking down complicated patterns into their component parts. This might have survival value in a bureaucracy, but a left brain alone in the wild would be unable to see the wood for the trees, let alone a half-hidden bear in search of dinner.' p37-38

Like I say, pattern recognition takes place in the right cerebral hemisphere. Although Rita does not discuss it, this pattern recognition is holographic/has to do with superposition of waves. I could go into this in great detail depending on knowlege of how computers work. Why they have great difficulty getting a computer to drive a car and the difference between a brain and a Boolean device and Turing machine. Today people naturally think of computers as digital because all modern general purpose computing devices are digital. But there is such a thing called an analog computer as well and that is the principle which calculators operate on and then, just like our brains, send it to an analog to digital converter (our conscious mind) for output. Our conscious mind is a simple output device. Or as Rita Carter says (she says none of the above) --

'The difference is probably because the left brain creates the feeling of amusement and so is quite happy to laugh at more or less anything when prompted [Like the happy-go-lucky-judge] - rather like the epileptic girl who laughed at the surgeons when part of her left hemisphere was stimulated on the operating table. Hence ordinary situations, with no 'twist', may be seen as jokes if presented as such. The right hemisphere is the one that 'gets' the joke, in that it registers the dislocation in logic that is a hallmark of most formal humour. This is a mild form of alert--a 'something not quite right here!' effect that, on its own, is not funny at all. In fact, it is a mild form of fear. Someone equipped only with this righ-brain ability might well think that any surprise ending makes a joke.'

Note she says above --

'THE RIGHT HEMISPHERE IS THE ONE THAT 'GETS' THE JOKE--'

As I have often said, understanding takes place in the right cerebral hemisphere and it is the left hemisphere that then puts an explanation to it because it is responsible for language and laughter. (It has Brocca's Area).

The right cerebral hemisphere does pattern recognition holographically and when a match is found in it (the subconscious) the left hemisphere is notified. The speed at which this is done totally baffles science - how is it you can recognize someone you have not seen in 20 years with a beard and gray hair in a wheel chair? It is mind-bendingly fast for a Boolean/Turing digital computer that operates on a serial bit-by-bit/pixel-by-pixel basis. Suppose the computer has 200 million people in its database. If you have a screen that has 1000 pixels height and 1000 pixels width 1000 x 1000 = million pixels per person.

Now suppose the person has their head turned just slightly different from the image stored in the computer. A match won't be found. That might be a bad example today because they claim to do it on TV by things like facial features independent of beards etc. But the principle is the same. The mind is not doing a pixel-by-pixel anything. As Rita says --

'The right hemisphere is also good at grasping wholes,--'

Meaning the entire person is one pixel holographically in the brain. More than that I would need to explain how a hologram is created. But it has to do with the superposition (addition) of waves. Waves interfering with each other constructively and destructively.

Mike Dubbeld

[Symptom777]

Hmm, I believe Oliver Sacks already quoted all these examples in his books.....