When flashing lights were changed to follow whatever strategy was being used to guess them, the left hemisphere will insist that it had just cracked the sequence

When guessing a sequence, the left hemisphere will choose a strategy even at the expense of getting things wrong. Another example of how the left hemisphere will confabulate explanations for things it doesn’t know and seems completely convinced of them, is a similar, earlier experiment in normal subjects, where researchers found that, not only does (what we now know to be) the left hemisphere tend to insist on its theory at the expense of getting things wrong, but it will later cheerfully insist that it got it right. In this experiment, the researchers flashed up lights with a similar frequency (4:1) for a considerable period, and the participants again predicted at random in a ratio of 4:1, producing poor results. But after a while, unknown to the subjects, the experimenters changed the system, so that whichever light the subject predicted, that was the light that showed next: in other words, the subject was suddenly bound to get 100 per cent right, because that was the way it was rigged. When asked to comment, the subjects—despite having carried on simply predicting the previously most frequent light 80 per cent of the time—overwhelmingly responded that there was a fixed pattern to the light sequences and that they had finally cracked it. They went on to describe fanciful and elaborate systems that ‘explained’ why they were always right.


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Type:🔴 Tags: Biology / Neuroscience / Neuropsychology Status:☀️