Can it be done?

This past week as I was frantically reading the textbook so that I'd have time to finish the project I found myself getting easily distracted. I figured it had to do with the detailed descriptions of the brain and its functions and decided to preserve so I could go to sleep and just get the grade. Close to two hours after the midnight oil had burned out, I was ready to call it quits, until I reached the experiments conducted on those with split brains.

As I began to read about the various experiments that have been conducted on the split brain ones, such as the HE*ART experiment, I was fascinated with the possibilities and questions that such a situation brought up. I was especially interested in the statement of how "it is almost like having two brains."

The idea of a brain transplant has always been a theoretical one, destined to the pages of science fiction until the future. As interesting as a brain transplant may be, I was far more engrossed in the idea of half-brain transplant. What if someone, when they died, donated both halves of their brain as two separate donations. What would happen if we were to put just the left-hempisphere of the brain into a body. Would the body be able to function as it normally did? Would the person be able to comprehend deeper thoughts or move half their body? What if the right-hemisphere was transplanted? Is it possible to live with only one half of a brain? Unfortunately, modern science is unable to test such things and we must wait for future science.

Another somewhat fantastical idea that this chapter made me think about was the possibility of creating a human. Would it be possible to study the brain to such an extent that we would be able to build an artificial working brain. If it were, could they be controlled? Would we be able to engineer a genius? What about a dutiful servant? Are the possibilities endless?