Neuroscience

What would it be like to possess two brains, each with its own view of the world and each with its own personality? Which one would be in control? Which one would be ‘you’? Of course, none of us literally has two brains. Yet we have two cerebral hemispheres, a right and a left, that in many important respects are duplicates of each other. Normally, the right and left hemispheres communicate extensively with each other, mostly via a large fibre tract known as the corpus callosum. Despite overall similarities in their organisation, there are marked left–right asymmetries in the details of how the hemispheres operate. Compelling evidence for brain asymmetry initially came from two groups of patients: those who have had a stroke affecting just one hemisphere; and those, the so-called ‘split-brain’ patients, who lack a functional corpus callosum connecting the two hemispheres, either because of a congenital defect, or as a result of surgery to ameliorate otherwise intractable epilepsy.

Anyone who has found herself in a supermarket late on Thursday when a new checkout opens will have no trouble understanding why evolutionary biologists have struggled to explain the development of altruism in humans. In On Natural Selection, Darwin asserts: ‘In social animals [nature] will adapt the structure of each individual for the benefit of the community, if each in consequence profits by the selected change.’ Yet, practically, how could that adaptation first develop outside family groups? How could a lone altruist achieve anything but loss?

In the last couple of decades, the disciplines of philosophy, psychology and neuroscience (and perhaps others, such as law) have witnessed intensified interest in the emotions. In cognitive psychology and neuroscience, several developments, especially advances in computational modelling and new brain-imaging techniques, brought early successes in understanding important aspects of perceptual and cognitive processes. Partly because it became clear that these processes were not as independent of the affective, volitional and appetitive faculties as the classical division of mind suggested, it wasn’t long before scientific researchers turned to the emotions (and the other peskier faculties). Most readers will be familiar with some of the recent popular works on emotion by distinguished neuroscientists such as Antonio Damasio and J. LeDoux.