Roger Wolcott Sperry

It's the 1960s.

Two scientists at the California Institute of Technology, Roger Sperry and Michael Gazzaniga, were studying patients with severe epilepsy.

To stop the seizure spreading, surgeons had cut the corpus callosum, the thick bridge of around 200 million nerve fibers that joins the two halves of the brain.

Sperry and Gazzaniga studied what happened when the two sides could no longer talk to each other.

And they found that the hemispheres do specialise.

Language sits mostly on the left, spatial awareness mostly on the right.

This was real, careful, Nobel Prize winning science.

Sperry won the Nobel Prize for Medicine for it in 1981.

Jaynes taught psychology at Princeton from the '60s through '90s but also studied ancient languages and made his own translations of Homer.

In the '50s, when Jaynes was a lecturer at Yale, he had become interested in the work of Roger Sperry, who discovered a lot of what we now know about the difference between the left brain and the right brain and later won a Nobel Prize for it.

Through experiments on people who had undergone a surgical procedure for epilepsy where they'd had most of the nerves connecting the two halves of their brain cut, Sperry found that the two hemispheres of the brain can each effectively function as their own brain, except for a handful of important functions like language, which seems to be localized to the left brain.

One of Sperry's weirdest findings was that the right brain can interpret signals and function perfectly well on its own but not in a way we would perceive as conscious.

Hold on to those words.

Dr. Roger Sperry was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1981 for his documentation of the differences between the two hemispheres of our brains.

One half of your brain puts you in touch with this present moment in this real world.

The other half puts you in touch with the past and the future in that mystical, magical, hallucinatory, unreliable world of imagination.

That is the physical reality.

And the behavioral consequences, which were studied extensively by neuroscientists like Roger Sperry and Michael Gazzaniga, are just astonishing.

What happens to the person? Do they survive intact?

They do, but after the surgery, the two hemispheres begin to behave as semi-independent minds.