No Self, No Problem

No Self No Problem — summary

A chicken foot, a snow shovel, and the first crack in your story about yourself

Imagine you are sitting in a small lab in California in the early 1970s. A neuroscientist named Michael Gazzaniga shows your right eye a picture of a chicken foot and your left eye a picture of a snow scene. There is nothing strange about this until you remember one important detail: your corpus callosum, the thick cable of fibers that lets your two hemispheres talk to each other, has been cut. Surgeons did this to stop your epileptic seizures, and it worked beautifully. But it left your brain split in half, with each side now operating like a separate person who cannot reach the other.

Gazzaniga asks you to point with each hand to a card that matches what you saw. Your left hand, controlled by the right brain that saw the snow, points to a snow shovel. Your right hand, controlled by the left brain that saw the chicken foot, points to a chicken. Perfect. Then he asks the question that will quietly redraw the map of human psychology for the next half century. "Why is your left hand pointing at the shovel?" Your left brain has no idea. It never saw the snow. But instead of admitting this, it does something astonishing. It invents an answer on the spot, with full confidence. "Oh, that's simple. The chicken foot goes with the chicken, and you need a shovel to clean out the chicken coop."

That story did not happen. The shovel had nothing to do with the chicken. But your left brain, faced with a gap in its information, did not pause, hesitate, or say "I don't know." It produced a tidy explanation and believed it. Chris Niebauer, a cognitive neuropsychologist who spent his career studying the two halves of the brain, opens his book *No Self No Problem* with this experiment because he thinks it is the single most important thing modern neuroscience has accidentally discovered. The little narrator in your head, the voice that explains why you do what you do and feel what you feel, is doing exactly what that split-brain patient did. It is making things up, all day, and you almost always believe it.