When guessing a sequence, the left hemisphere will choose a strategy even at the expense of getting things wrong
The left hemisphere will confabulate explanations for things it doesn’t know and seems completely convinced of them. The fact is that this habit is far from harmless: it leads the left hemisphere to make poor inferences and some mistaken choices. In one experiment by Micheal Gazzaniga’s colleagues, split-brain subjects were asked to guess which color, red or green, was going to be displayed next, in a series where there were obviously (four times) more green than red. Instead of spotting that the way to get the highest score is to choose green every time (the right hemisphere’s strategy), leading to a score of 80 per cent, the left hemisphere chose green at random, but about four times more often than red, producing a score of little better than chance. The problem here, as subsequent research has illuminated, is that the left hemisphere develops a rule—a rule that is, however, wrong.
References
- Mcgilchrist, Iain. (2010). The Master and His Emissary Chapter 2 What Do the Hemispheres Do (p. 165). London, UK: Yale University Press.
Metadata
Type:🔴 Tags: Biology / Neuroscience / Neuropsychology Status:☀️