Right hemisphere? Left hemisphere? It doesn't matter as long as you have a corpus callosum

        Akiva Somer

            How crazy it is to know that if we did not have one feature of our brain, the corpus callosum, we would  would not be able to function even remotely properly! The corpus callosum is so powerful and without it, the two hemispheres of our brain would not be able to communicate with each other, and we would not be able to function. People without corpus callosums supposedly have "split brains." This concept may be very confusing, so bear with me as I try to explain it in the best way as possible.

            When a person with a split brain looks at two words at once, the right hemisphere of the brain sees one word and the right sees the other word. When you ask them simply what they saw, they would say that they saw the word that the left hemisphere saw. When you ask them to point to the word that they saw, they would point to the word with their left hand that the right hemisphere saw because the right hemisphere of the brain is in charge of the left hand's movements. 

            There was another experiment done in 1998 by some scientists to further the explanation of how a split brain works. They placed a picture in front of a person with a split brain. On the right side of the picture, there was a chicken's foot, which is what the left hemisphere saw, and on the left side of the picture, there was snow covering the ground, which is what the right hemisphere saw. Then there were cards placed in front of the person; one card had a picture of a shovel, and it was on the left side and the other was a picture of a chicken coup, and it was on the right side. Then, he was asked to point to which card corresponds to each picture in the big picture. Since the right hemisphere saw the snow picture and it controls the left hand, the left hand pointed to the picture of the shovel on the left side. Furthermore, since the left hemisphere saw the chicken's foot, the right hand pointed to the chicken coup o the right side. Then, the experimenter asked him why he was pointing to the shovel on the left side. Since the left hemisphere controls the talking and the left hemisphere saw the chicken's foot, he got really confused and was not able to explain why he was pointing to the shovel when he saw the chicken's foot.

           I find it so interesting that our brain could interact so well and so quickly just because of one feature of the brain. The corpus callosum enables us to realize that we actually saw both of the words and that we saw both of the pictures, and it also helps there be no noticeable separation between the right hemisphere and the left hemisphere.