Reference
Michael Gazzaniga
The interpreter, the finding that the speaking hemisphere invents reasons for what the other half did, is his.
Gazzaniga worked with Sperry on the original split-brain studies and went on to describe the effect that makes them genuinely strange rather than merely interesting. Given an instruction only the right hemisphere could see, a patient would act on it and then, asked why, produce a confident explanation that had nothing to do with the actual cause, and believe it.
He called the mechanism behind that the interpreter. It is the reason we treat the feeling of recognition when a type description fits as evidence of something, but not necessarily evidence of the thing the reader assumes.
Referenced work
- Who's in Charge? Free Will and the Science of the Brain (2011) reference
Elsewhere
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