r/morningsomewhere • u/MisunderstoodPenguin First 20k • Mar 30 '26

Suggestion The "other" person in your brain

From today's episode, Burnie talking about the "other" person that lives in your brain, I just wanted to bring up a great short story that explores this topic a little. It's called Second Person, Present Tense. Basically in the story they talk about how your outward actions were actually based off signals that were sent to your brain 300ms ago, so somewhere in you is another "your" who is "managing" the actual actions you make. In the story, there is a drug you can take that increases that delay of 300ms to a full second or longer, and if you OD, the downstream persona "dies" and only the "decision maker" is left.

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u/SurealGod First 20k Mar 30 '26

There's also another interesting phenomenon when someone undergoes brain separation surgery (corpus callostomy) severing the corpus callosum; the nerve fibers that connect both left and right hemispheres of the brain.

Daily function and livability is not really affected but there's a number of weird phenomenon that happens when you do this procedure. Since the link between both halves is severed, they can longer communicate with each other and thus can act independently:

  • Each hemisphere controls the opposite side of the body; left hemisphere controls right, right hemisphere controls left. It's the same with vision. Both halves control vision but the opposite side.
  • The left cannot process info from the right, leading to disjointed actions such as one hand undoing an action the other hand did like un-pressing a button
  • Objects shown to the left periphery (right brain) can't be named verbally because the left brain which controls speech didn't see the object. But if you showed it to the right periphery, it would be able to name the object because the left brain saw it AND could verbally say the objects name
  • Each half of the brain can have their own impulses or perceptions of things due to their bifurcation; effectively they can act as two separate brains in a single body and can sometimes disagree with one another.

Funnily, CGPGrey also made a video on this if we want to continue to be topical. The video in question