Hofstadter, Dennett - The Mind's I

Further Reading 481Further Reading 481newly discovered apparent case of multiple personality is Deborah Winer's "Anger andDissociation: A Case Study of Multiple Personality," in the Journal of AbnormalPsychology (vol. 87, (3), 1978, pp. 368-372).The famous split-brain subjects are another matter, for they have been investigatedintensively and rigorously in laboratory settings for years. In certain forms of epilepsy asuggested treatment is a commissurotomy, an operation that almost cuts the brain in halfproducinga left brain and a right brain that are almost independent. Amazing phenomenaresult-often strongly suggestive of the interpretation that commissurotomy splits theperson or se V, in two. The huge literature that has sprung up in recent years about thesplit-brain subjects and the implications of their cases is lucidly and carefully discussedin Michael Gazzaniga's The Bisected Brain (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1970);in Michael Gazzaniga and Joseph Ledoux's The Integrated Mind (New York: Plenum,1978); and by a well-informed philosopher, Charles Marks, in Commissurotomy,Consciousness and the Unity of Mind (Montgomery, Vt.: Bradford Books, 1979).Thomas Nagel has written one of the most provocative articles on the topic, "BrainBisection and the Unity of Consciousness," which first appeared in Synthese (1971) andis reprinted in his Mortal Questions (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1979)along with "What Is It Like to Be a Bat?" and many other compelling essays, includingseveral on topics raised by The Mind's I.Another well-documented case that has recently interested philosophers and psychologists is that of a man who, due to brain damage, isblind in a portion of his visual field. He claims (not surprisingly) that hecannot see or experience anything in that portion of his visual field but(surprisingly) he can "guess" with excellent reliability the shape andorientation of certain symbols placed in his (rather large) "blind" area.This has come to be called "blind sight," and it is reported in L. Weiskrantz, E. K. Warrington, M. D. Saunders, and J. Marshall, "Visual Capacity in the Hemianopic Field Following a Restricted Occipital Ablation,"in Brain (vol. 97, 1974, pp. 709-728).Howard Gardner's The Shattered Mind: The Patient After Brain Damage,(New York: Knopf, 1974) is a highly readable and carefully researchedsurvey of other remarkable phenomena, and contains an excellent bibliography.Classical accounts of particular individuals who should be familiar toanyone seriously embarking on an attempt to theorize about consciousness and the self are to be found in two books by the great Sovietpsychologist A. R. Luria: The Mind of a Mnemonist (New York: Basic Books,1968), the story of a man with an abnormally vivid and compendiousmemory, and The Man with a Shattered World (New York: Basic Books,