Afterlife Read Free Page B

middle. (It has even been suggested that one of them is intended as a ‘spare’ in case the other half gets damaged). The top part of the brain, the part immediately below the skull, is the specifically human part; it is called the cerebrum, or cerebral hemispheres, and it has developed at a phenomenal speed over the past half million years (which, in evolutionary terms, is the mere bat of an eyelid). If you could remove the top of the skull, the two halves of the brain would look rather like a walnut. The bridge that joins them together is a bunch of nerves called the
corpus callosum
.
    For more than a century it has been known that the left hemisphere deals with language and logical thinking, while the right seems to deal with patterns and intuitions. The left enables us to add up a column of figures, the right to recognise somebody’s face. You could say that the left is a scientist and the right is an artist. A man with left-brain damage will probably develop a speech impediment, but he could still draw a picture or hum a tune. A man with right-brain damage will sound perfectly logical and coherent, but he will probably not even be able to draw a matchstick man.
    The strangest thing is that if the bridge joining the two halves, the
corpus callosum
, is severed (as it sometimes is, toprevent epilepsy), the patient literally becomes
two
people. One ‘split-brain’ patient tried to unzip his flies with one hand while the other tried to do them up; another tried to hit his wife with one hand, while the other held it back. Another tried to do a jigsaw puzzle with his right hand, and his left hand kept trying to interfere, so that he had to sit on it. (It should be added that the right brain controls the left side of the body, and vice versa — once again the reason is a mystery.)
    But the most significant discovery is that the person you call ‘you’ lives in the left brain; the person who lives in the right seems to be a stranger. One split-brain patient whose right brain was shown a dirty picture (i.e. with her left eye) blushed; when asked why she was blushing, she replied: ‘I don’t know.’
    Jaynes believes that ‘disembodied voices’ come from this ‘other person’ in the right side, and that they sound in the left brain — the ‘you’ — as if through a loudspeaker.
    There is one obvious objection to this theory. Jaynes is not a split-brain patient, yet he had an auditory hallucination. The same applies to Adam Crabtree’s patients. The curious answer is that, to some extent, we are
all
split-brain patients. Every one of us is more or less out of touch with that deeper intuitive self. Mozart once remarked that tunes were always walking into his head fully fledged. What he meant, obviously, was that tunes came into his left brain — the ‘I’ — from the other half, the half that creates tunes and pictures. And if even Mozart is, in some sense, a split-brain patient, then the rest of us most certainly are.
    According to Jaynes, it was voices that walked, fully fledged, into the left brain of our remote ancestors. They assumed — understandably — that these were the voices of the gods — or of God — and this is why people in the Old Testament or the Iliad are always being told what to do by divine voices …
    This particular aspect of Jaynes’s theory is irrelevant to our present discussion; all that concerns us here is his belief that ‘voices’ originate in the right brain, and that men have been hearing them since the beginning of human history. If that is correct, it certainly offers a plausible explanation for the voice of Sarah’s grandmother and Susan’s father and Art’s mother — in fact, in the latter case, it sounds far more convincing than the notion that a living woman in Detroit could somehow ‘get inside’ her son’s head in distant Toronto.
    It is when Jaynes goes on to discuss the voices heard by mental patients that certain doubts begin to arise. He pointsout that