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Comment by mrkstu | Hacker News Reader

As can be seen by the specializations between human brain hemispheres. There is a bus between them, but when that communication is cut, and you can see that a lot of what we perceive as a single thought process, is a bunch of independent computing entities with an OS layer on top creating the unity that doesn't really exist.

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When Covid hit me, it felt like having a stroke and the effect was that I suddenly perceived that I don't have enough energy to sustain vision, instead I could perceive the delineation between object localization, object recognition, character-to-text conversion etc. It was like the brain was an engine that suddenly lacked fuel (I could force individual parts to "work" at the cost of immense pain) and dissolved into individual services competing for resources. The experience was both frightening and awesome. Not sure how I survived that (it took over 3 years to get back to normal). Diffuse MRI didn't find anything anyway.

had a relatable but almost opposite experience (no obvious infection, but it was winter 20/21), where I noticed that objects in my visual field seemed to be differentiating themselves away from the background and “competing” for my attention when previously I had to go hunt for them.

October 2020 here. I guess you got a boost whereas I got an obstruction of whatever was delivering energy.

> The experience was both frightening and awesome.

Basically LSD.

It feels so weird to just... I don't know, have a different personality for a while. And when your normal self clicks back it's so relieving.

This made me appreciate what a miracle it is that my brain is fully working most of the time, and realize what a horrible disease dementia is.

>a lot of what we perceive as a single thought process, is a bunch of independent computing entities with an OS layer on top creating the unity that doesn't really exist.

How else could it be? At some level, it would inevitably be a top-level aggregation "creating a unity that doesn't really exist". The alternative would be for the whole brain to be a single elementary particle!

Just to be clear here, are you talking about the 'left-brain, right-brain' thing? Because I thought that was pretty well debunked.

Also, I think you are talking about the corpus callosum for the 'bus' right?

He's probably talking about split brain patients. Here's a video by CGP Grey about them: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wfYbgdo8e-8

Yep.

AFAIK, the part that's been debunked is that there's a complete separation of concerns between the two hemispheres. From studies on split-brain patients, there does appear to be some specialization, but it's much fuzzier than "right brain does art, left brain does analysis" or anything like that.

>Because I thought that was pretty well debunked.

Only when it comes to "left/right side analytical/creative" split, and even that mainly based in a single 2013 study, which could have all kinds of issues. Not regarding different functions in general.

>a lot of what we perceive as a single thought process, is a bunch of independent computing entities with an OS layer on top creating the unity that doesn't really exist.

As described in Marvin Minsky's fascinating book "Society of Mind" ...

Or well, it does exist. But maybe more in the "ant hill" sense than feels comfortable to admit.

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