Description
Two eyes, ears, nostrils, brains, is one of the illustrations used in a lecture James Langdon presented for his School for Design Fiction, at Galerie für Zeitgenössische Kunst, Leipzig, November 2013.
The illustrated lecture explores the work of American neuroscientist Michael Gazzaniga. In the early-1960s, as a student of Roger Sperry (who later won a Nobel Prize for his work on split brains), Gazzaniga participated in the first trials of splitting the corpus callosum (the fibrous connection between the two hemispheres of the brain) in humans. This followed several years research on cats, rats and monkeys, which had demonstrated that an animal with the two hemispheres of its brain disconnected essentially becomes two independent beings within one body.
Gazzaniga conceived a series of experimental cognitive tests to understand what this might reveal about the function of the human brain. From this work the most striking concept to emerge is called the ‘interpreter’ by Gazzaniga. The interpreter is an area in the left hemisphere of the human brain that exists to construct a coherent narrative from the cacophony of stimulation that the senses receive and present to the brain. The interpreter is a filtering mechanism that enables us all to have a feeling of continuity and progression in our identities and experiences.
Gazzaniga’s work has since been applied in law. It has been explored by lawyers as a potential strategy for defending the actions of murderers and other serious criminals. The logic is that there is an element of chemical determinism in our actions that could be argued diminishes our responsibility for our responses to particular stimulations.
Langdon and K. N. W. show how Gazzaniga’s work could also be used to understand the sense in which humans are the natural storytellers of the universe.
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