Boonta Vista - BONUS EPISODE: The Theo Philes XV - The Little Flappy Bits Of Switzerland / A Clonusless Tonus

Episode Date: February 11, 2026

The Theo Philes returns, and just in time for Freemium Freebruary. Theo and Ben bring you: The thrilling geographical world of enclaves and exclaves, and what happens when a perfectly healthy brain is cut in half. *** Outro: Out of Mind - DIIV *** Support our show and get exclusive bonus episodes by subscribing on Patreon: www.patreon.com/BoontaVista *** Email the show at [e-mail]! Call in and leave us a question or a message on 1800-317-515 to be answered on the show! *** Website: boontavista.com Twitch: twitch.tv/boontavista

Come one, come all and gather round, we'll tell our tales to thee Of saints and whores and demon cores of sights for all to see Come ye all around the fire and listen all the while To tales of holes and mystery We call theophiles, we call theophiles, we call theophiles Hello and welcome to the Theophiles. That's right. Your ears do not deceive you.

Neither does your heart. I'm here with Ben as always. It is a kind of a Ben-theo thing. Have we ever had anyone else on it? I can't remember. Did we? No. Did we?

No. Maybe, no. I think we'd thought about having someone on that would be good at Theophiles. Did we do it? surely the title of the episode would be far too long by the time you put a guest in because you've got episode whatever the Theophiles part whatever

the two different episode titles from each half featuring Yeah well not featuring because we had that one person complained six years ago that if we use feet with a full stop it makes their podcast player

So we switch to with instead of feet Yes So as to avoid any further criticism. That's right, because I can't... If one person's not happy, I'm not happy. Yeah.

So if one person's not happy, two people aren't happy. If you're familiar with the format, Ben and I find things interesting in this crazy world of ours. And sometimes we like to tell each other about things that we find interesting. And that's it. And if you don't find that interesting, then, you know, that's fine too. There's not many of these. Yeah, if you...

Like, the numbers on the Theo Files... are lower than our regular episodes. So there are people that go, oh fuck, it's a Theo Files episode, no thank you. Which to me, I think this is the only worthwhile format of the podcast.

That other stuff is just garbage. Whereas this is just for us. It's kind of a little more, you know, we're learning stuff, we're thinking we're being thoughtful. The mainline episodes we make for the studio. Yeah. And then the Theo Files we make for us.

Yeah, this is our, which ones are the Sodoback movies that he made for himself. Schizophrenus. This is our Schizophrenx. Oceans 12, but not 11 or 13. Yeah. Anyway, just to,

it's been a very long time since we've done one of these. So I think it's probably worthwhile us doing a quick calibration up front before we get started. And then it's sort of a me and then Ben sort of thing, right? So first little bit is going to be

kind of me with a, thing that I found because I'm, I have a certain condition, and then Ben's much more interesting and funny part at the back. Oh, shush. Shush, your hot little lips. So, yeah, just before we get started, just a few questions for you, Ben, and we'll mark

down the results, and then we'll get started. Would you rather, Ben, have a Prime Minister of Australia who was an ex-JB. Hi-Fi baddie with a wolf cut, or to get milk,

we need to boil potatoes and they moan the whole time. Who told you about wolf cuts? Someone who wanted the worst for me. I think I would choose the J.B. Hi-Fi baddie, because that's an inevitability, right? 20 years time. I guess most of our politicians never had like actual jobs because they sort of went from being like...

It is possible. It is possible. It is possible. They just did like uni. were heavily involved in student politics and that immediately started working in someone's office as a staffer and then became a politician and then they do that for a while until they get a parliamentary pension and then they go and like advise for the companies that they were making policies previously to try and like control yeah absolutely and there might be different ways to approach that we're not sure yet in Australia we haven't tried something different it's just sort of up and down so far so good kind of the wet private boy squid to lawyer school, to prime ministership, to making the world worse in fossil fuel generating companies.

It helps that they're wet because they get to slide down the pipeline much faster. We can get them in there as young as Wyatt Roy age. Unfortunately, he went a little, he went a little dry, White, Roy, I'm going to say, he got stuck in the pipe. He fell out of the pipe and into the United Arab Emirates? Is that what happened to him? Yeah, he's a big Neum guy now. Thanks, Wyatt.

All right, I've got to get through these carbation questions. I only got three. Number two, would you rather have a prime minister who's an ex-JV hi-fi baddie with a wolf cut, perfect policies, a UBI, etc? or the only way to play music in this world is to use record players and the only technology we have for the record player needle is organically derived and the whole time the record is playing the the wet fleshy little nub is secreting a stinky white liquid and then after the record is finished you have to take it outside and hose the record off I think I'm going to

go for the first one again okay yeah okay good choice I want there to be as few obstacles between me and playing a record as possible. I don't want to just think, well, I can just watch this on, put it up on YouTube on the TV. No, no. Unfortunately, in this world, the speakers, inside the speakers are also wet little secretive knobs as well. It's the only way we know how to make sound. Right. Yeah.

So there are also just, so I can calibrate with these questions. There might be other things that are flow-on effects or unrelated that I didn't know about in these hypotheticals you're setting up. Correct. It's a whole world to explore out there. Wow. Yeah, but that one's finished. Finally, would you rather a Prime Minister, baddie wolf cut,

she can kill you with like one of those those leg kicks that like chopped down on the head first and kind of just sever your spy? Is that an axe kick? Yeah, an axe kick. Or maybe even go the whole hog, go a wheel kick. Right, direct to the top of your dome. Sounds great.

Yeah. Or do you want to be the guide that's in the Wikipedia article for most disgusting deaths ever because you're in the ear medicine aisle at the pharmacy browsing for medicine for your horrible itchy little ears. The wax is the wrong color again when due to an undiscovered congenital condition, all liquid in your body immediately went super critical and exploded you, causing a crater in the ground, you know, in the thing, obviously killing you, instantly and two bystanders and then forever you're the guy that exploded in the

ear medicine aisle of the pharmacy yeah it's probably going to be the first one again i think okay very interesting okay all right and this has been a political poll sponsored by the australian greens political party thank you ben we're political again we're doing satire not even the parties that we like can escape our gaze I had a minor revelation the other day, actually. So this is related to Chemist Warehouse, not the Australian Greens political party. Yeah.

Part of the reason why Chemist Warehouse sucks so fucking much, I realized when I was there the other day with my beautiful wife, is that no other chemist in Australia does floor-to-ceiling shelving. Yeah. They're very clinical, open, light spaces. I think mostly because they're very worried about. theft because it's a pharmacy yeah so they probably want to be able to see over all the shelves but they are all very white very sterile very open and you can see around the whole

place whereas chemist warehouse floor to ceiling shelves it's dark it's claustrophobic yeah yeah it's kind of it doesn't feel like a pharmacy it feels like more like a crazy clerks or a stacks discounts yeah and the whole time as well in the um you are absolutely flooded with signifiers. It's like, you know how they tell you in, like, web design or whatever,

you should have one hero button. That's the call to action button that you click. Chemist Warehouse is 100% of those, right? All of the price tags are like bright, red, and yellow, and they have exclamation marks on the end of all of them. Fucking everywhere. There's so much semantic meaning in like every, in your entire field of vision all the time.

Yeah. And if I knew the names of any philosophers, I'd go like, eat your heart out. You know, Charlesard. Bodreliad? Bodrelaid, I was thinking about it. Probably. I don't, I'm not familiar with any of his work.

We're so stupid. Yeah, we're really not educated. Yeah, I haven't been reading about philosophers, but I have been reading a lot about enclaves and exclaves lately. I love both. Really? Have you seen this, Ben? Have you heard about this? Have I heard about them broadly or about the specific ones you're about to mention?

I don't know. Well, let's find out together. Okay. So just to give everybody, get everybody up to speed. So there's bits of countries that exist within other countries, either wholly or in in part. And there's like way more than you think there are. Right? Like I thought there was like five of these.

things, right? So an enclave is a territory that's entirely closed within another single territory, and an exclave is when that territory belongs to juror to another country. So it's like, if I gave you a kidney because you needed it, and that's what friends do, thank you. My kidney would be enclave within your body, and it would be an exclave of my body, right? Yes. Or if you grew one of those weird cancers with hair and teeth, in them underneath one of your nipples, that would be an enclave, but it wouldn't be an exclave because it doesn't belong to a different territory somewhere else. Yes, yeah.

And the turds that you lay in the toilet bowl, they're not an exclave. Even though they're external to you, that's just an overseas territory. Thank you so much for explaining this away that everyone can understand. In metaphor, that kind of illuminates while it titillates. Obviously, like the enclaves people are most familiar with, the things. like Vatican City, maybe San Marino and Lesotho, right? Luxembourg doesn't count. It's just a landlocked country. It's just a little tiny country. It's just a little guy. Because it has more than one neighbor as well, right? It's not like the Vatican City, which is wholly within the bounds of another

country. Exactly. But Monaco City is a semi-enclave because it's contained within France, but then also borders the sea. Oh, right. It has a path of egress if it really needed to. If you really need to, you can go by sea. But that would still be French waters, though, wouldn't it? I think so, yeah. Yeah.

But the sea border has to be shorter than the land border. Otherwise, Denmark would be an enclave of Germany. And obviously, that's not true. And then something like Greenland is just an overseas territory. Just a couple more rules to get through before. Exclaves don't need to be neighboured by only one country. So the Kaliningrad Oblast,

which is that big chunk of Russia next to Poland and Lithuania in the Baltic Sea, you know the little bit of Russia that's like not the rest of Russia? I don't know if I'm familiar with that bit of Russia. There is a piece of Russia the size of a small country

in Europe neighboring the Baltic Sea. All right. And it does not connect to Russia at all. And that's a semi-exclave because it's external to Russia, but then it's also on the ocean. And the same goes for Alaska, which is also semi-exclaves. I've ever heard of this before in my life. That's really interesting. There's a bit of Russia right in the middle of Europe.

Yeah, right. So I assume this is when, was Lithuania part of the USSR when the USSR existed? and then they, when it became independent, they just lost, well, Russia got to keep that tiny little bit near the sea. I think they liked the little sea part because then they could have a different port on the Baltic Sea, right? It's sort of like Jarvis Bay in Australia. Yeah, sort of like a Jarvis Bay.

I mean, there can be enclaves and exclaves that are not like specific to countries. So territories within, there are cities that exist within other cities of the same country kind of thing. I like the city in the city. Well, Ben, you are getting ahead of yourself. But let's start in Cyprus. So there's a thing on the island of Cyprus called the Dekelia Sovereign Base Area, which is an exclave of the UK. It was one of two they set up as part of the Cyprus-1960 Treaty of Independence.

But because of Brexit, it's no longer part of the EU. But Cyprus is, so they do a bunch of EU shit there, because it's just easier for everyone to live their lives. And, of course, everybody hates this whole process. Nobody wants that to be there. But within this enclave, there are two Cypriot villages, Zilotimbu and Ormodea, which are doubly enclaved and also exclaimed by the UK territory, right?

Surely this is just hell for everybody, right? But these are villages that obviously, it was like non-optional for them to keep their sovereignty. So then they live on Cyprus inside the UK. That's fucking amazing. That's incredible. Right. But then also within this sovereign territory,

there is two exclaves that is the DeKylia Power Station. One is on the water and one is a little bit north of it, separated by a road that is Britain in between inside of Britain, which is also inside of Cyprus. That's quite beautiful. So I think like the reason why this sort of appeals to me is because it's where all of the normal rules just start falling apart. Where you kind of go, well, they're in this because it must be this. You know, so a great example.

If we're thinking of famous casinos and enclaves, we all know what Europe's oldest and biggest casino in an enclave is, right? Absolutely. Which is? I have no fucking idea. It's not Monaco, you dumb slut. It's actually the, it's in the Campiona Detalia, which is this tiny little sliver of Italy sitting on the eastern side of Lake Lugano, which is enclaveed by the little flappy bits of Switzerland that go into the north of Italy, right?

About one kilometer from the border of Italy. It's just this, it's literally like, um, couple of hundred meters of of Italy in Switzerland for very poorly defined reasons. It has Europe's largest and oldest casino, which I had never heard of in my life before, the casino de Campione. So being part of the EU, the euro is the only legal tender there, but everyone uses the Swiss franc. And everyone is also payrolled in the Swiss franc. they also get like Swiss medical care and all of this sort of stuff in there, but they don't get,

but if you live within that territory, you don't get like the Swiss unemployment or what have you, but if you live in like the village over the road and work there, which lots of people do, you get all of the Swiss benefits, etc. It's interesting. Borders are kind of silly, aren't they? Borders kind of very silly things.

Yeah, isn't that funny? Sometimes I just think of them as like lines on the map. Yeah. You can't cross-a-manary on. lines, can you? The Ven barn or the Fen Railway was built in German territory by Prussia. But then in the Treaty of Versailles in 1919, the track bed and the stations were made part of Belgium as part of some sort of deal that they did.

But that exclaimed a bunch of like six little bits of land on the western side that were cut off by the land that the train line took, right? And five of them still exist, which include my favorite exclave. Rookschlard, which consists of one house and a garden. And Rookslag is German for setback. That's really nice. You've got your own little bit of Germany? That's so good.

Yeah. I don't know. It just tickles a part of my brain that otherwise I would have to take drugs for, which are illegal. Yes. No, they're illegal. Oh, okay. They're not good. Yeah.

Have you seen that the weird little, I don't know if it even counts as an exclave, but I think it's at like the north, the very northeast corner of the US, there's a tiny little bit of, there's a tiny little peninsula that goes down beneath whatever the parallel is that the northern US border is drawn across. And there's just a tiny little American peninsula

that is only connected to Canada? Yes, that is the Minnesota Northwest Angle, which is a Pina-In-Clav. What? Pena, ex-clav, which is, I actually had, I skipped over this paragraph because my eyes were moving too quickly. So that is contiguous with Minnesota

because it is connected all the way through by territory, but that territory is water, and by land it can only be accessed through Manitoba. And I think there's one in Washington. Yeah, I was thinking of the one in Washington, I believe. Yeah, there you go. Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan have a bunch of exclaves between each other that they're trying to like sort out legally. But as Uzbekistan is one of two doubly landlocked countries, which means that you have to go through two countries to get to the sea.

I think that makes that the Kyrgyzstan exclave in Uzbekistan a triply landlocked country, territory, I don't know, which is an award I'm just going to give it now. Yeah, I think it deserves that. Yeah. But I do want to end this with the most Theo and Ben Ars' enclave situation, which is the situation of Bali Hurtog and Bali Nassau, which is Belgian and Dutch cities, which are both the same city.

So this city came, situation came from a bunch of medieval treaties, land swaps, jack jobs, deal wheels. And what they ended up with is a village in the Netherlands, where most of the southern half is Belgian, most of the northern half is Dutch, but not all. And it's a big mess. And so there's Dutch bits in the Belgian bits,

and there's Belgian bits in the Dutch bits. such that the city and the country that you're in changes like on a street by street or building by building basis or even within the same residence. So there was a point during COVID-19 where Dutch laws said that restaurants had to close earlier than Belgian restaurants.

So customers would have to move their table to the Belgian side of the restaurant for the remainder of the night. Oh, shit. They're just like, trap. trafficking fireworks year-round as well, like just going like down the street to the, to the fireworks country city, which is also the same city that you live in. And finally, there was a part of World War I where Belgian refugees would take shelter

in the Belgian parts of the village that were surrounded by the Dutch parts. So the Germans could not cross into there without violating Dutch sovereignty. It's just, I mean, that rules, it's also kind of like very quaint by today's standards as well where they would just drop a Tomahawk missile on them or whatever. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Man, that's so nice. They made the city and the city from the city and the city. They made the titular city and the other titular city from the city in the city.

But guess what? It's the same city. Really just one city. Yeah. Borders are fake. Yeah. I hope that in each of those cities that are the same city, There's one office split right down the middle, Belgian Dutch, and there's on one half a Belgian guy, one half a Dutch guy.

And they both have an enormous collection of dusty tomes and big pull out map drawers for documenting where the lines are everywhere. They're the sort of the mapmeisters, the line meisters. And they both hate each other's guts as well. They fucking hate each other. and they're both like cantankerous men in their 80s that worked at the same office for like 60 years inherited the jobs from their fathers

who also hated each other. Oh, that's really beautiful, Theo. Thank you so much. Thank you. But you have to turn your screen on. It doesn't work in that context. Okay. Can I ask you a personal question?

Of course. Are you symmetrical? No, I'm not. Okay. I mean, like from me, you possess a sort of like a bilateral symmetry. A symmetry, yes. Yeah.

But do you, like what sort of, in what ways are you not symmetrical? The direction in which my heart faces, the placing of like the liver and internal organs in the trunk. Oh, largely. Yeah. Yeah, I don't know whether anything outside of that. I think it is large lausons. This was a very comprehensively correct answer to that question. Yeah, I have some experience with this.

I am the orthodox way around. Yes, unlike people who have, I believe it's called, is it Cytus or Cetus Inverdis? Yes. Like Catherine O'Hara, who just passed. Yeah, I saw that. She was a swap around. Yeah.

She had a little internal swap around. Yeah. Well, there's other ways that we're not symmetrical as well, generally speaking. Generally, our left and right arms will be different sizes to each other. Arms are chiral? Well, I mean, they are definitely chiral. They're definitely chiral. They possess chiral symmetry, but they're also asymmetric, superficially, largely.

Your legs statistically are likely to be different sizes a bit. Your feet are almost certainly, like I think it's like 90% of people, 95. Your feet are generally different sizes. What do we mean by different sizes? Like up to like half a shoe size generally. There's a little bit of variation, yeah. You personally almost certainly have one testicle lower than the other. Yes.

Which is a thing for comfort, apparent. Well, not four, but it does provide. Yeah, mine's for a different reason. You have a dominant hand, probably. True, yes. That is very true. You're right-handed, presumably. I am right-handed.

Like the majority of the population. you'll probably also have a dominant right eye because everybody, well, 99% of people have a dominant eye about 70% of people, it's their right eye, about 29% of people, it is their left eye, and then 1% matchy-matchy. So like the differences aren't huge. You may have noticed, I know I certainly did as a kid at one point, that if you sort of alternate closing your eyes. One of them

does seem to pick up colors a little bit more vividly or has a little bit more contrast to it. It's not always very pronounced but you can notice it in some situations. Your dominant eye is also the one that you would use for positional information. So say you were like trying to gauge the distance of something like you

were siding down the barrel of a gun. Okay. You would likely prefer to use your dominant eye for that even if you didn't consciously know. If we were to close the other one, like naturally? You would probably go to use your right eye if it was your double-in-eye. Although, you know, with a gun, I guess it might depend on your handedness and how you holding the gun, what have you.

This eye preference is not specific to human beings. We see this as well in animals. So, for example, in some species of fish, studies have shown that they choose to use one of their eyes to look at novel or threatening things and another and their opposite eye for commonplace things like the the other fish in their school so if they're trying to check it out they have a preference for which one they use for what they think something might be that is crazy is there in humans is that linked to i guess our eyedness to which which half of our brain oh fear you're getting ahead of yourself okay i didn't want to uh studies

have shown that this is also true in some birds. Some studies have shown that certain species of birds will use their left eye to look up at aerial predators by their right eye to look at familiar birds. Studies of lizards and toads have found that they favour their left eye for, quote, antagonistic encounters over their right eye for more familiar ones. And some of these studies also found that the animals in question were likely to have a change in their normal behavior towards an enemy or friend based on which eye they viewed the enemy or the friend.

Oh, it's just a little shortcut that their brain takes too far. That's exactly right. So they've looked, they've used the predator eye for a friend and they've gone, hey, fuck you and started pecking the friend. Yeah. Or they've used the friend eye for a predator. Well, I mean, if he was my friend, he wouldn't be in my predator eye. That's right.

Why is he in my right field of vision if he's a predator? You sound crazy. Yeah. Now, as you so intelligently anticipated, this is because in us and in these animals, our brains are contraterally mapped. So our left eye is wired to the right half of our brain, our right eye is wired directly to the left half of our brain. This has taken me a very long time to invest in believing in kind of thing because... It doesn't change your life much day to day. But I like, you know, there are so many of these things that we say.

say like that it's like, oh, you know, this person must be right-brained or something because they're creative or whatever this may be. Exactly, right? You go, well, okay, I'm just going to throw the whole lot away because... I don't care if there's a baby in that bathwater. Yeah, it stinks. The bathwater stinks. And so these, as you were saying, these are shortcuts in the animal's brain in that it is

quicker for them to process the friendly encounter with the stuff from their right eye with the stuff from the left half of their brain. Yeah. and quicker for them to process an enemy encounter with the stuff in the right half of their brain from their left eye. Now, we don't have this big distinction in how we respond to stuff from our right and left eye because we have a thing in our brains, as do most placental mammals, called the corpus colossum. Yeah. A pun on which is also the name of the character

of one of the people of one of the people in Fury Road Corpus Colossus played by What's his name? Quentin, what's his last name? Is he the big guy? He know, he's the very little guy. Oh, yeah. It's a double joke.

Double joke. A little Australian irony there. A little classic Australian double joke. It's a joke exclave. Now this, the Corpus Colossus allows, it's a big tract of nerves that is beneath our cerebral cortex and it allows rapid communication

between the two halves of the brain. Only found in placental males, so not in marsupials. So you have even less in common with kangaroos than you thought. Yeah. But you do have this in common with like horses and cats and things of that nature.

Just not platypus. Just not platypuses or koalus. You might be sitting there trying to pick a difference between you and a platypus. Well, here's one. There's one if you can't think of one off the top of it. So this allows us to, you know, look at stuff with our right eye and then still use, like, quite quickly use stuff that's in the right half of our brain to process that. So it gets rid of this sort of specialisation problem because there is an interconnector.

There's a risk involved in like preferencing one side of your body, obviously, if a predator could come from any angle, you know? Cats, cats have this because they're placental mammals. But what if they didn't is the question I know that you're. asking while you're looking at gnome. In the 1950s, a neuroscientist named Roger Sperry, and a student of his named Ronald Myers, operated on some cats and severed their corpus colossums. And also there, I didn't write this part down, their optical chasm.

Does that sound right? Cat surgery. From the Greek chiasmos. Okay. So this is, it's, yeah, they had to take the top of their skulls off to do this and then Yeah. Put it back on, let him heal up. And then once they were healed, they got the cats.

They put an eye patch on the cat, so covering one of its eyes, but leaving its other eye uncovered. And then they taught the cats how to navigate a maze. Now, once they got to the point where the cats could demonstrate that every single time they could solve the maze to get the food, they took that eye patch off. And then they put the eye patch back on, and they put it on the other eye of the cat. And you know what they found, T-bird? Could still navigate the maze? It could no longer navigate the maze.

Isn't that interesting? Oh, man. Now you might be thinking, okay, what if there is some internal mechanism that was reconciling imagery from each side? And now they could just no longer seeing it with the right eye connect it with the memory of seeing the maze. So as a control, they did the exact same thing with cats that. hadn't had their corpus colossum severed. And they trained the cat to navigate the maze with only one eye. Then they swapped the eye patch over and then they were perfectly able to traverse the maze.

So didn't have the same problem. I'm going to tell you, as a participant in that study, I would prefer to be in the control group that doesn't get its skull popped off. Oh, you'd love to be in the control group. And an ice pick driven into your head. Yeah. Now, let's do a little jump back in time here. The next couple of paragraphs I'm going to read to you.

I've taken most of this information from a paper titled The Evolution of Corpus Colosotomy for Epilepsy Management that was published in the journal world Neurosurgery. It's the year 1886, and Sir Victor Horsley, a pioneer in epilepsy research, finds that after severing the corpus colossum in dog, that quote, now I think you're going to like this quote. Bilateral movements could be obtained upon excitation of one hemisphere, but the movements were not the same in character on the two sides.

The true cortical effect of tonus followed by clonus being only obtainable in the side opposite the excitation, whilst the effect on the same side was only a feeble tonus. Oh, tonus without the clonus? It was a tiny little tonus with no clonis. Okay. Yes, because they severed the corpus colossal. I briefly came into contact with the word clonis a little while ago and thought, oh, that's interesting. Was it from the movie The Clonis horror?

No, I think it was from the therapy I do for my head. Interesting, I've never heard those words in that context before, and feeble tonus. Simply wonderful. A feeble toadus. We all know the embarrassment, the pain of having a feeble tonus. Well, for a lot of people that's not about that. Yeah, it's what you do with your feeble tonus. Let's jump forward to 1892, and the neuroscientist,

Je-Jules-Dejolins describes a case in which a human patient who has acquired... Jeze-Jet-de-Jez-Jure. He has a patient who has acquired damage to his corpus colossum and to his visual cortex, and as a result, he is now able to write, but he is not a... able to read. I've heard of this one. Interesting, isn't it? Can you imagine that you're just like,

someone's like, hey, could you just write out a paragraph for me? And you're like, no worries. To me, that's simply no problem whatsoever. And they're giving it to them and being like, hey, what is this saying? They're like, what are these? Where did this come from? I've never seen this before. I cannot assign it meaning.

in 1908 a couple of years in the future there the German neuroscientist Hugo Lipman describes a similar case where the patient now is unable to write or do simple tasks with his left hand only. Right hand is still fine. It's so messed up that the brain has the lines and stuff that can get cut because it shouldn't be that way.

It should be like an undersea cable between. It shouldn't be. It should not be. It should be all one big melon up there, just trading juice. They reckon there might be some other mechanisms via which they do exchange information as well. It's not limited to the... Juice-based, yeah.

Yeah, that's right. It might be juice-based. The juice-based theory of mind is becoming much more popular. Juice-swapping? From dome to dome. In the mid-30s, the neuroscientist Walter Dandy, You might know him from the syndrome named after him and another scientist, Dandy Walker Syndrome.

I think I've got that. I think you might. I've seen you walk. He performs the first sort of like deliberate corpus callosomy to a human, colosotomy, sorry, to a human being for therapeutic reasons. He does this to, quote, extirpate pineal tumors in a patient. Okay. I need a baddie with a wolf cut to do that to me.

It was successful. It worked. He ends up doing a few of these, I think. Now, one of those patients who underwent the procedure, because they need to have a cyst removed, later studies on him reports he's no longer able to read with the left. Like, he can't recognize writing in the left field of his vision, and he can no longer recognize characters from the alphabet by feel with his left hand.

but he is still able to do both with his right eye and his right hand. Now, skipping forward a little bit again with 1939, the neurosurgeon William P. Van Varganen, he takes the first surgical division of the corpus colossum undertakes it on a patient with the express purpose of treating epilepsy, because throughout his work he's observed that there's a strong correlation between epileptic seizures and how intact the corpus colossum is. Wow, okay.

And this guy's just been rubbing his hands when he's like, hey, you know, everything's bad right now, but mind if I just pop that skull open? I just need to do a little slice that I reckon you're going to feel way better. A little pop and slice. And it turns out he was, well, who can say if he was correct to do this, but it worked. He does this to about 10 patients and it does reduce the symptoms of their symptoms of their epilepsy and the severity of their seizures

for whatever reason I mean maybe because it's disgusting but these fall out of favor for a little while so for like 40 years no one does this to treat epilepsy until stocks in the pop and slice are down that's right everyone's trying other more woo-woo shit for a little while

then the 60s comes along and a pair of neurosurgeons named Philip Bogan and Joseph Vogel, they read up on the work of Varganen and they go, well, this works. Why don't we do this? And they successfully use a callosotomy to treat a man who had previously untreatable seizures. After this, they end up doing the same procedure with a bunch of people and it works. And after this takes the existence of these people who are healthy people who have severed corpus. Corpus, what are they called?

Colostoms? Yeah. Colossums. Colossums. Not the Colostoms. Corpus Colostoms. You also got to get that out, but they go in the other end. Because we've got these people now, that allows for the work of a man named Michael Gazzaniga. Gazzaniga was a doctoral student of Roger Sperry, who you might remember from the blindfolded, eye patched cat experiments from earlier.

And now he's talking to his friend Roger and they've got something better to work on than cats that had their skulls cut open. They have humans who have split brains that are perfectly fine. Because I was waiting for the turn and I don't want to kind of minimize the subtleties of everything that goes on with an enormously invasive surgery

like brain surgery, right? to say you're going to get in there and there's going to be some ups and downs. Yeah, there'll be some flow-on effects. But they're reasonably like they're living, they're healthy, their epilepsy has reduced. Yes. At the very least, it means that the epileptic seizures they're having aren't traveling from one hemisphere to the other. It stops the seizure from traveling across the brain.

Oh, okay. I get it. So it's like having like a backup engine sort of thing. You've got like one side is seizing. Yes. Is that just reduced severity then of the seizure or is that enough to control it such that it doesn't? I think it just seemed to greatly reduce the severity and the frequency was the impression that I got. Right. That is wild. I'm going to quote quite heavily now from an article that was published in August of 1967 Scientific American.

It was called The Split Brain in Man. Now, this is an article that is detailing tests that Gazzaniga and Sperry undertook with 10 patients after they had had a callosotomy, noting several unusual behaviors that contrasted with, quote, one of the most striking observations of the study being that, quote, the operation produced no noticeable change in the patient's temperament, personality, or general intelligence. Yeah, which is usually sort of the kind of the road that so many of these go down. as far as, like, you know, obviously Finius Gage, having gotten a much less precise procedure performed upon him by a railway spike. Yes, who was not medically licensed, don't my doubt. No. But then also, you know, people who have suffered, you know, repeated shocks to the brain

due to their work, you know, or due to war, you know, lead poisoning, the commonality between so many of these appears to be like reduced control of impulse, like reduced impulse control and that they become very rude, right? Very, very like a shadow of the person they were previously. Yes. Well, in this case, it didn't seem to have any of those effects.

They seemed, despite the fact that one of the major parts of their brain had been split in twain, they seemed kind of fine with just a few little eccentricities, which I'm going to start detailing. So these are direct quotes from the article. Gazzaniga writes, in the first case, the patient could not speak for 30 days after the operation,

but he then recovered his speech. More typical, though, was the third case. On awakening from the surgery, the patient quipped that he had a, quote, splitting headache. Very good. Because his brain had been split. Yeah.

And in his still drowsy state, he was able to repeat the tongue twister, Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers. So, brain going great. Literally just woke up. I've usually got a headache and I cannot say that. So he woke up from the surgery of getting his brain split in half and he was... Immediately starts doing bits.

Yeah, he's doing gags. He's a podcaster. Close observation. However, soon revealed some changes in the patient's everyday behavior. For example, it could be seen that in moving about and responding to sensory stimuli, the patient's favor the right side of the body, which is controlled by the dominant left half of the brain. For a considerable period after the operation,

the left side of the body rarely showed spontaneous activity and the patient generally did not respond to stimulation of that side. When he brushed against something with his left side, he did not notice that he had done so. And when an object was placed in his left hand, he generally denied its presence. Oh. Hmm.

So they noticed this, and then they begin doing some sort of more specific, tests. More specific tests identified the main features of the bisected brain syndrome. One of these tests examined responses to visual stimulation.

While the patient fixed his gaze on a central point on a board, spots of light were flashed for a tenth of a second in a row across the board that spanned both the left and the right half of his visual field. The patient was asked to tell what he had seen.

Each patient reported that lights had been flashed in the right half of the visual field. When lights were flashed only, in the left half of the field, however, the patients generally denied having seen any lights. So it's interesting, isn't it? Dominant left half the brain controlling the right, receiving the input from the right field of vision. Yes. Seeing stuff perfectly fine, responding to it. And so did they do any tests where they would just simply, like, close their right eye and see with their left eye? Like, is this, like, is the information getting in there at all?

Well, that's very interesting that you ask. Thank you. I've kind of got a researcher's brain. Since the right side of the visual field is normally projected to the left hemisphere of the brain and the left field to the right hemisphere, one might have concluded in these patients with divided brains that the right hemisphere was in effect blind. So they're saying, well, if you were an idiot, you could hear that information and think that... If you've rushed to conclusions, yeah. Yes. We found, however, that this was not the case when the patients were directed to point to the lights that had flashed instead of giving a verbal report. with this manual response they were able to indicate

when lights had been flashed in the left visual field and perception with the brain's right hemisphere proved to be almost equal to perception with the left so verbally they report having not seen any lights but manually

they will indicate that they've seen lights isn't that interesting almost it's a weird spot right where you kind of go like, I believe that that to be true, but I can't... If I truly take that information in, I've got to start asking a whole bunch of fucking questions.

Exactly right. About who am I? Yeah. What am I? Yeah. How many of me is there? Now, this trend continued through experiments where they exposed one eye to an image or allowed one hand to touch an object while the hand in object were out of view.

again from the article, when the information, visual or tactile, was presented to the dominant left hemisphere, the patients were able to deal with and describe it quite normally, both orally and in writing. For example, when a picture of a spoon was shown in the right visual field or a spoon was placed in the right hand, all the patients readily identified and described it. They were able to read out written messages and to perform problems in calculation that were presented to the left hemisphere. In contrast, when the same information was presented to the right hemisphere, it failed to elicit such spoken or written responses. A picture transmitted to the right hemisphere evoked either a haphazard guess or no verbal

response at all. Similarly, a pencil placed in the left hand behind a screen that cut off vision might be called a can opener or a cigarette lighter or the patient might not even attempt to describe it. Now, you might be wondering, did this just make them part stupid? No. Not a thought that I was having. I was thinking that they might have maybe a superpower.

Well, Gazzaniga agrees with you. He doesn't think they're part stupid. He says, did this impotence... Oh, I'm left stupid? I'm stupid leftly. Did this impotence of the right hemisphere mean that its surgical separation from the left had reduced its mental powers to an imbecilic level?

The earlier tests of its nonverbal capacity suggested that this was almost certainly not so. Indeed, when we switched to asking for nonverbal answers to the visual and tactile information presented in our new psychological tests, the right hemisphere in several patients showed considerable capacity for accurate performance. So you've just got to find a way to communicate

with the right brain that's not via the left brain. For example, when a picture of a spoon was presented to the right hemisphere, the patients were able to feel around with the left hand among a varied group of objects and select a spoon as a match for the picture. Furthermore, when they were shown a picture of a cigarette, they succeeded in selecting an ash tray from a group of 10 objects that did not include a cigarette as the article most closely related to the picture.

Okay, so this is, because previously I was sort of running up a theory in my mind that the non-dominant half of the brain was sort of falling back on the long. lower, more reflexive resources of the brain, right, that don't go through the full processing, you know, for speech or reasoning or that sort of stuff, you know, your reflexes, you're going to put your hand up to stop something from hitting you in the face, that kind of thing, right?

But it's going through that. It's getting, it's obviously reasoning. It's reasoning. But it's not connected to the verbal processing, which must be occurring in the dominant half of the brain, right? Yeah. So, like, your left hand, which you can't see, is feeling around behind a screen.

Yeah. And is feeling objects. And found a metaphor for the thing that you see on the screen. It found a symbolic connection, and you have no awareness that it's doing it or why it's done it. Yeah, that's not all. In one particularly interesting test, the word heart was flashing.

across the center of the visual field with the her portion to the left of center and art to the right yes asked to tell what the word was the patients would say that they had seen art the portion projected to the left brain hemisphere which is responsible for speech yes curiously when after heart had been flashed in the same way the patients were asked to point with the left hand to one of two cards art or her to identify the word they had seen they invariably pointed to her The experiments showed clearly that both hemispheres had simultaneously observed the portions of the brain available to them, sorry, the portions of the word available to them, and that in this particular case, the right hemisphere,

when it had the opportunity to express itself, had prevailed over the left. Oh my goodness. Now, this made them realize that they were able to individually test the abilities of each brain half. I think I've seen, I think you're up to a snippet that I've seen. scene of this that somebody put in in the discord when I was claiming that the brain was indivisible and so therefore was the soul. Well, yeah, you might have to rethink some of that maybe.

Yeah. They realized that like the abilities of the right brain varied quite a lot in patients. So they had one patient who had basically no linguistic comprehension whatsoever in the right half the brain and another who was quite advanced from the article again. In another test, three or four letters were placed in a pile, again out of view, to be felt with the left hand. The letters available in each trial would spell only one word, and the instructions to the subjects were spell a word.

The patient was able to spell such words as cup and love, yet after he had completed this task, the patient was unable to name the word he had just spelled. Mm-mm. Mm-hmm. Yep. And there's like there's sub clauses to all of this that I've seen, right, where there are people who have had to rebuild their visual or auditory centres, they're sort of due to, you know, congenital disorders or brain damage or that sort of stuff.

And that 100% affects what happens to you afterwards in such situations like this, right? Like the brain will move an important section of processing in response to damage. And then, yeah, then if you were to perform this kind of experiment, you would end up, not that this kind of procedure and then followed by, that the results would be very different sort of thing. And like the brain is built up like a muscle for a lot of this stuff, that it will just go, hey, you know, this is the center. of excellence for looking at stuff.

And it happens to be in your left hemisphere. Yeah. It's a lot. Yeah. So like one of the conclusions you can draw from what we've seen so far, which they certainly did, was that it just seems like the left and the right brain weren't communicating at all inside the brain. Which makes sense, right, given the nature of the procedure performed.

Yeah. But it does allow for one other. avenue? What if they communicate with each other outside of the brain? Now, they call this process cross-kewing. We had a case of such cross-kewing during a series of tests of whether the right hemisphere could respond verbally to simple red or green stimuli. Yes. At first, after either a red or green light was flashed to the right hemisphere, the patient would guess the color at a chance level, as might be expected if the speech mechanism is solely

represented in the left hemisphere. So it's getting flashed to the right hemisphere, but they're asking verbally. So the left hemisphere is responding. Yeah. And it's getting like 50-50. Yeah. But after a few trials, the score improved whenever the examiner allowed a second guess.

So they've got it wrong. And they said, well, do you want to try again? They're Monty hauling this shit. Okay. Wow, sort of. We soon caught on to the strategy. patient used. If a red light was flashed and the patient by chance guessed red, he would stick with that answer. If the flashlight was red and the patient by chance guest green, he would

frown, shake his head and then say, oh no, I meant red. What was happening was that the right hemisphere saw the red light and heard the left hemisphere make the guess green. It's exiting the system instead of going through the bridge in his brain. It's coming out... By the mouth. The left hemisphere, out the mouth, and then back in through the ear, into the right hemisphere. Well, sorry, coming from the right hemisphere,

coming out through the mouth, going back into the left hemisphere. Yeah. To answer the question, yeah. Knowing that the answer was wrong, the right hemisphere precipitated a frown and a shake of the head, which in turn queued in the left hemisphere to the fact that the answer was wrong

and that it had better correct itself. Isn't this fucking crazy? It's like if your phone wasn't on the Wi-Fi and you wanted to connect to Spotify on a device in your house and it goes out via the internet and then comes back in or something, right? Like it's taking a path like a million times longer as a workaround to what happens to us 24-7 with an intact kind of.

Yeah. Like in a way it's an elegant solution because you're using the tools you have at hand to solve an otherwise practical problem, but it's very wasteful compared to... And they're okay with this? Like, I mean, it seems to be kind of picked up with a with a sort of nonchalance that is like, well, you know, everybody's perfect.

What do you do with this information, though? You completely... You'd have to form a new theory of consciousness. And there are, I don't get into it, but there are like a couple of working models of how consciousness is formed, none of which we can prove or are really better than the others, that integrate this information into them quite well. Because it's a, I would say, a severe challenge to many theories of mind, right?

Yeah, there's some interesting ones. There's one that, like, consciousness is just an emergent property of any, like, a bridging mechanism in the brain that has to combine a bunch of information needs consciousness to deal with it. It just sort of emerges. There's some that suggests that we are just, just sort of an aggregate of multiple consciences of greater or lesser power. Yeah. It's very interesting reading.

Now, because they were able to test each brain separately, they could sort of gauge how good each side was at certain tasks, and they did see a lot of difference there, but they did find certain similarities in how each half the brain responded to some stuff from the article again. We found that in certain other mental processes, the right hemisphere is on a par with the left. In particular, it can independently generate an emotional reaction.

No. In one of our experiments exploring the matter, we would present a series of ordinary objects and then suddenly flash a picture of a nude woman. It's like good old-fashioned. I've got to get one at least science. I got on this experiment. This evoked an amused reaction

regardless of whether the picture was presented to the left hemisphere or the right. That's so beautiful. Some things are universal. Hemispheres love a nude. Part of us. Yeah. Both hemispheres love a nude tain.

When the picture was flashed to the left hemisphere of a female patient, she laughed and verbally identified the picture as a nude. When it was later presented to the right hemisphere, she said in reply to a question that she saw nothing, but almost immediately a sly smile spread over her face and she began to chuckle. You old dog. Asked what she was laughing at, she said, I don't know.

nothing. Oh, that funny machine. So some part of her brain is being like machine funny, but she has no idea why. Although the right hemisphere could not describe what it had seen, the site nevertheless elicited an emotional response like the one evoked from the left hemisphere. Now, obviously, this is all very interesting, but it's preliminary, right?

Yeah. You'd be crazy to draw any big philosophical conclusions from it, right? I mean, you know, a scientific part. that they draw in the article. All the evidence indicates that the separation of the hemispheres creates two independent spheres of consciousness within a single cranium. That is to say, within a single organism. This conclusion is disturbing to some people who view consciousness

as an indivisible property of the human brain. I mean, you've got to be thinking. If you're in this deep and you're getting these results, you're going to have some big thoughts about it, I think. You've got to stay awake a while longer than usual when you go home that night. Like, it turns out that there's, like,

we split one bucket of consciousness into two buckets with like a little bit of osmosis in between them. And they're still both full. And they're still both full. Seemingly, except one is illiterate. Well, no, not even illiterate. Oh, yeah. Yeah.

I'm going to leave you with one more excerpts. This comes from a paper titled, explicit dialogue between left and right half systems of split brains. This was published in Nature in February of 19. So this is, you know, 15 years after the previous studies. They're still doing these. Yeah, I probably wouldn't have gotten tired of it either. I'd still find this mildly interesting.

Enough to get me out of bed at the morning. Yeah. This paper recounts a number of experiences, one in particular with a patient named J.W. J.W. was a 27-year-old man who had had his corpus colossum severed to stop the spread of seizures from one hemisphere to the other. Now with JW they devised an experiment where he would be exposed to a random number between zero and nine in his left field of vision. He was unable to say aloud what the number was when asked, but his left hand would correctly point to one of two cards that said either go up or go down, allowing him to say out loud what the number was following these prompts.

So one half of your brain is like, six and the other half your brain's like, warm up? Yeah. And yeah, so you're getting these little like, and he's still guessing. So the hand will point to go up and then he'll go over. Then he'll point to go down and he'll go down and then eventually he'll get it.

They also note that the part of him that was talking didn't seem to actively prompt the left hand to provide another direction. Like he wasn't doing it of his own accordance. The left hand would only start pointing if the scientists asked it to. so you tell me they seem relatively confident that he's not bullshitting they have a quote here a useful check that he was not just play acting was provided by an episode when his mouth guessed one and his left hand pointed to go down j w complained vocally that there was no more numbers down there and had to be reminded of the possibility of zero which was the correct answer

you tell me dog here's the extract that I would like to leave you with. However, we are still vexed with the question of whether the two half systems here embody two free wills in the sense in which, say, two normal human players on opposite sides of a guessing game have independence of will. An ideal demonstration of such duality of will would be the capacity to bargain. That is, to struggle to induce changes in one another's evaluative criteria or priorities as distinct from merely struggling physically in pursuit of conflicting goals.

Accordingly, the experimenter, who we will call E, next proposed to J.W, that the left hand, who we will call LH, should be paid by the right hand, RH, for each item of information. So this is playing the same game. But bargaining, making each side pay. Using his right hand to pay for the left. Oh, man.

Ah, H, the right hand, was provided with an open box containing a limited supply of tokens and instructed to pay one token into a similar box on the left for each correct answer by LH, the left hand. RH was rewarded with additional tokens in inverse proportion to the number of guesses required to identify each flashed numeral. So the faster he does it, the more tokens the right hand get. No, the left hand gets paid by the right hand. Any occasional mistakes made by the left hand were penalized by repaying three tokens per mistake to the right hand. As elaboration of the game in this way proved congenial to JW, we next introduce the possibility of a evaluative conflict by proposing to quote,

ask the left hand whether it would like to be paid more for each answer. the left hand was asked to reply by pointing to a card representing one, two or three tokens and it immediately indicated three tokens. As soon, as this soon had... Brother, they're all your tokens. Wow, are they? Ah! Big question!

As this soon had the foreseeable effect of rendering the right hand bankrupt and halting the game, the experimenter then asked, let's ask the left hand whether it would settle for less. The left hand immediately pointed to... two tokens, but at the same time, and apparently as an integral part of the action, J.W.'s mouth said, sure, make it two tokens. So... So, replying to his hand. Well, I think that was maybe the left hand talking? This was typical of the impression

conveyed throughout the second phase of the experiment. I've got to go on living, dude. I've got another... I've got another couple of decades to keep going. Well, I have plenty of time to think about it. Okay. The impression is that although J.W's left hand and right hand were substantially separate at the cognitive level, their priorities gave no evidence of being under the supervision of two independent normative systems. So they're acting separately, but perhaps still with unified goals.

So maybe... Yeah, like when my two boys team up to get ice cream. Yes, even though they are at odds with each other fundamentally, they can still act as a system towards a single. goal. Yeah. Hey Ben, I guess. Yep.

What do you do with this information? What are you fucking, like, there's reading to be done, I guess. There's lots of thoughts about it and stuff. I mean, it pretty, it, it, it does definitely drive you towards particular conclusions, vis-a-vis, how. What's in there? What's in there? What, what it's all about?

What am I? Am I just my left brain? talking to you currently? No, because I have a Corpus Colossum. Yeah. But what if I did? Both. I'm bringing the right side along for the right.

If I met the other half of my brain, would I like me? Yeah. Probably not. Hey, this was an episode of the podcast, Punta Vista. Theo, thank you so much. Enclaves. Thank you, I think. Triple claves.

You got it all. If you've got any fun theories of mind, you'd like to share with us, or you're a researcher working in that. You've got papers you've written. nail bag at puntervis.com. If you're not a researcher, just think it, like, just kind of share it with the other

other hemisphere, yeah. There's like smoke a fat, Jay. Yeah, put on lateralis. Put on lateralis and just think about what the fuck is happening in that little coconut head of yours. Yeah. Whole world's in there.

We'll talk to you real soon. Bye. Bye.