THE BEHAVIORAL AND BRAIN SCIENCES (1981) 4, 93-123

Printed in the United States of America

The case for mental duality: Evidence from

split-brain data and other considerations
Roland Puccetti
Department of Philosophy, Delhousie University, Halifax, Nova Scotia,
Canada B3H3J5

Abstract: Contrary to received opinion among philosophers, psychologists, and neuroscientists, conscious duality as a principle of
brain organization is neither incoherent nor demonstrably false. The present paper begins by reviewing the history of the theory
and its anatomical basis and defending it against the claim that it rests upon an arbitrary decision as to what constitutes the
biological substratum of mind or person.
It then moves on to provide a dynamic model for double consciousness in vertebrate brain organization, giving an
evolutionary account that explains why, although each of the two cerebral hemispheres benefits from sensory input from the
other for representation of the ipsilateral half of cosporeal and extracorporeal space, it was important that conscious experience
be confined to each rather than spanning the two. This interhemispheric duplication effect for sensory representation has been
known for years but hitherto considered mysterious, or ignored on grounds that integration must be achieved at a higher level of
processing.
The paper then attempts to resolve a puzzle about split-brain patients in testing situations, namely why it is that in spite of the
speaking hemisphere's denial of any independent perception and agency in the mute hemisphere, which would explain its role
in cross-cuing, the latter never seems to resent this, but instead continues to be cooperative and helpful. It is suggested that on the
hypothesis of mental duality this is understandable, for the nonverbal hemisphere would have known prior to the surgery that it
is not generating linguistic behavior.
Finally, the essay examines two kinds of bitemporal defects, one due to callosal and the other to chiasmal disruptions. On the
present theory a bitemporal defect should be demonstrable in the former case when both eyes are open, because in the absence
of a corpus callosum and other forebrain commissures the interhemispheric duplication effect is abolished; in the latter case
interhemispheric duplication is preserved, and so the defect should be demonstrable only by testing each eye independently.
This is indeed what the evidence indicates, so it appears that, contrary to the prevalent view, the function of the corpus callosum
is not to integrate and unify conscious experience between the hemispheres but to duplicate this, in accord with the model of
mental duality.

Keywords: cerebral hemispheres; consciousness; corpus callosum; mental duality; optic chiasm; split brain

Introduction unexplained facts make sense on this hypothesis; and

When Galileo expounded the Copernican hypothesis,
resistance came not only from defenders of Church
doctrine but from defenders of common sense. If the
earth turns on its axis every twenty-four hours, should
we not feel the force of an enormous wind? If we jump
straight up, should we not land at a point opposite to
the direction of the spin? How is it that birds fly with
equal ease in every direction? Such objections, of
course, overlooked gravitational effects on the atmo-
sphere, forces of inertia, and other factors.
I believe that it is the same with the hypothesis of
mental duality as a principle of organization of the
brain in humans (and indeed in all vertebrate species).
Instead of taking the theory seriously and seeing what
empirical consequences flow from it, theorists have
brushed it aside as counterintuitive, incoherent, or
demonstrably false. It will be the task of this essay to
show that, on the contrary, a great number of hitherto
further, that some facts that it predicts can be docu-
mented in the literature and in clinical practice but
have gone unnoticed until now just because the
hypothesis was not seriously considered by workers in
the field. In addition, the essay will attempt to give an
evolutionary underpinning to mental duality, attribut-
ing its origins to the requirements of vertebrate evolu-
tion in general rather than to adaptation to human
cerebral asymmetry of function. But first, something
about the history of the theory and its anatomical
basis.
The history is very brief indeed. It was Wigan (1844)
who first proposed that we have, as he put it, two
minds; and it will give some idea of the popularity of
that claim to observe that the second advocate of this
hypothesis, Bogen (1969), is very much with us today.
The present author is unhappy with these earlier
formulations of the theory, on the grounds that it is
difficult to make sense of the idea of one person's

1981 Cambridge University Press 0140-525X/81/040093-31/$04.00/0 93

Puccetti: Mental duality
having two minds (Puccetti 1973); but for the purpose
of this paper such differences can be overlooked. What
unites the three of us is a common belief in mental
duality.
The anatomical basis for the theory has been known
since the time of the medieval Cell Doctrine (Chad-
wick & Mann 1950; Clarke & Dewhurst 1972): namely,
the double structure of the telencephalon (Dimond
1972). In humans this is so pronounced that, even
though I shall follow customary terminology by speak-
ing of two cerebral hemispheres, it is not incorrect to
refer to these as two half brains or even, simply, as two
brains (Jackson 1874; Brown-Sequard 1877; Paget
1919; Young 1962).
Now of course it does not follow from having two
cerebral hemispheres, half brains, or brains that
animals with this anatomical arrangement will have
two conscious centers or minds, or that they will really
be two persons in one body. It is always possible that
integration of conscious content takes place at some
higher level of information processing. To discount
that possibility, many more facts and other consider-
ations will have to be brought to bear, as we shall see.
However, it can be argued that no theory of mental
duality can get off the ground if it depends on this
anatomical fact, for to attempt this is to impute mental
functions to parts of the brain, as if each cerebral
hemisphere were a little "homunculus." It is this rather
elementary objection that any theory of the mind-brain
relationship must first confront.
But to characterize, or even caricature, a theory on
this basis is not to show it false. Notice, for example,
that the objection would equally undermine a theory
that wherever there is one normal, intact human brain
there is one mind. If mental functions cannot be
imputed to parts of brain, then how can they be
imputed to all parts of the brain together? And in that
case the "homuncular fallacy" objection serves to make
impossible any specific mind-brain theory whatever.
Yet it would be absurd to impute mental functions to
the organism as a whole, or even to the whole brain,
since destruction of the cerebral cortex is enough by
itself to render a human permanently nonsentient and
noncognitive, even if the patient can breathe sponta-
neously for as long as seventeen years (Ingvar et al.
1978).
If this is correct, we can set aside such preemptive
gambits and address the real issue. Given this dual
anatomical structure, does the normal human brain
support one conscious center or mind, or two? Before
our own time there was certainly little reason beyond
the bare anatomy of the brain to suspect that mental
duality might be the correct answer. What has changed
all that, or at least given the theory of dual conscious-
ness a new lease on life, is, of course, the series of
split-brain experiments done with human subjects.
The human split brain
The medical justification for forebrain commissurot-
omy in humans is familiar: intractable, life-endanger-
ing grand mat epilepsy, which the neocommissural
fibers facilitate by transmitting seizures back and forth
94 THE BEHAVIORAL AND BRAIN SCIENCES (1981), 4
between the cerebral hemispheres. The early successes
in therapeutic cerebral commissurotomy did not have
clear-cut psychological sequelae (Akelaitis et al. 1942),
but following animal experiments by Myers and Sperry
(Sperry 1961), and with the use of improved surgical
techniques (Bogen & Vogel, 1962) as well as better
testing procedures (Sperry et al. 1969), it became
possible for the first time to demonstrate mutual func-
tional dissociation of the disconnected hemispheres in
virtually all cognitive and volitional activities (Sperry
1968). If nothing else, it seemed that mental duality
could be surgically induced, so that the potential for
double consciousness already existed in the normal - if
epileptic - human brain.
Now many writers have objected to even this modest
claim (Nagel 1971; Anderson 1976; Wilkes 1978; Kins-
bourne 1980; Marks 1980). I shall not review here their
grounds for resisting the above description but shall
merely point out that the split-brain patient is abso-
lutely unique in one respect which no other description
captures so easily and clearly. Under strictly controlled
laboratory conditions, when the word teacup is
projected tachistoscopically on a screen, tea being
flashed to the left and cup to the right of the fixation
point, he cannot read off the whole word. Instead he
will, if right-handed with speech in the left hemi-
sphere, say the word was cup while his left hand, under
control of the normally mute right hemisphere, will
point to the word tea in an array of words that includes
cup and teacup. I have yet to see a convincing argu-
ment showing that it is wrong to claim that this
demonstrates mental duality in the split-brain patient,
and of course the vast majority of informed observers
agree.
Thus for purposes of attributing mental events to
split-brain subjects we are forced to use the "homuncu-
lar" language of referring to a "left hemisphere"
stream of consciousness and a "right hemisphere"
stream in the same human being. Others may take
umbrage at this, but what is the alternative? As Bogen
(1977) has pointed out, just about everyone who works
with these patients, regardless of nationality, religious
background, or political affiliation, does exactly the
same. Otherwise one gets into a conceptual morass
when trying to answer straightforward questions like
the following:
Q. Did the patient see the word teacup?
A. Of course he did.
Q. Then why did he say he saw cup?
A. His left hand pointed to tea, so if you put the two
responses together . . .
Q. But the left hand passed over teacup in favor of
tea, just as he said he saw, not teacup, but cup.
A. Well, it's all the same patient, isn't it?
Q. Yet you or I would say teacup and point to
teacup with the left hand. Surely there is some
difference between our responses and his. And that
difference seems to be that his left hemisphere sees
only cup, the right only tea.
A. If you insist. . .
We can now proceed to ask ourselves what, if any,
implications the split-brain data have for the structure
of consciousness in the normal human brain.

From split brain to normal brain
The received view, if I may call it that, seems to be that
this dissociation phenomenon in commissurotomy
patients tells us nothing about ourselves because, with
the corpus callosum and other forebrain commissures
intact, visual phenomena initially registered in one
hemisphere are sent across the interhemispheric path-
ways to the other, and vice versa, producing a fusion of
the material into a single image (Sperry 1977). Thus it
is common to say, according to this assumption, that in
humans a split brain produces a split mind (Gazzaniga
and LeDoux 1978, p. 18).
I wish to challenge the assumption that leads to this
received view. To revert to the example used above,
the split-brain subject says he saw cup; but if a verbal
response is blocked and he is asked to point with the
left hand to the word he saw in an array of words, he
points to tea. So here it appears that what is going on in
each hemisphere is not just an initial registration of the
visual material but a reading out - verbally in one case,
manually in the other - of what was actually seen. Now
if the arrival in area 17 (primary visual cortex) of
neural messages that are decoded as a familiar word is
adequate to produce this behavioral readout generated
from each of the cerebral hemispheres of the split-
brain patient, why should it not be adequate in the
callosally intact subject as well? One may, if one
wishes, simply assert, "Oh, no! In us, that initial regis-
tration is not at a conscious level; it has to be followed
by fusion into a single image before we see anything."
But in that case the burden of argument is upon those
who assert this. Specifically, they must tell us where to
look for the neural mechanism that accomplishes this
fusion; or else they must retreat into mentalistic
assumptions to explain it, when everything else about
the primary visual system is already explicable in terms
of neural mechanisms.
An alternative to the received view is to be forthright
and explain the split-brain performance as follows.
Because of the surgery, the letters T-E-A seen in the
right hemisphere are not being relayed to the left,
speaking, hemisphere, and so the patient correctly says
he saw cup. For the same reason cup is not being
relayed to the right hemisphere, and thus he points to
tea. But then in the callosally intact human brain the
word teacup is seen at the same time in both cerebral
hemispheres, half the word registering in area 17 and
the other half (probably) in the prestriate cortex
(Sperry 1970) of each hemisphere. If this is what really
happens, consciousness does not span both hemi-
spheres; otherwise, without the fusing assumption, we
normals would see teacup teacup instead of just
teacup. Thus, with regard to vision, a split brain does
not produce a divided mind but deprives two minds of
visual input for the ipsilateral half visual field.
These observations allow us now to consider a
specific model of mental duality in the normal brain
with regard to visual information processing and to
explain at the same time why we are not introspec-
tively aware of this state of affairs.
Suppose you are seateoSin an enclosed booth looking
through a window on the far wall that reveals exactly
Puccetti: Mental duality
half of a football field, the half to your right. But just to
the left of that window is a television screen of the same
size, on which is projected the half of the football field
to your left. This half field is projected with such
fidelity, however, that you do not think it is a television
screen but the left half of the same window space.
Now, unknown to you, there is an adjoining enclosed
booth to the right of yours, where another fan sees the
same events on the field as you do, except that in his
case the real window gives on the left half field and the
television screen pictures the right half of the field.
Above both your heads, of course, is a television camera
that films what is going on through each window and
relays this to the screen in the adjoining booth. If
transmission latency from camera to screen is no more
than a few milliseconds in either direction, it is hardly
surprising that both you and your neighbor next door
fail to detect any phenomenological disparity between
screen and window viewing. Nor is it surprising that, if
someone cuts the relay cables, both of you lose sight of
the half of the football field to your own side of the two
adjoining booths. Yet nothing in the visual experience
of either of the viewers, before or after the cables are
cut, provides any introspective evidence that there are
really two of them, side by side. Indeed, as Gazzaniga
(1970) has pointed out, following split-brain surgery,
the speaking viewer to the left initially does not even
notice that half the field is gone!
This model of mental duality also allows us to clear
up a conceptual confusion that has plagued discussions
of the organization of consciousness for over a century.
Briefly, many writers have felt that if there is one
indispensable feature of conscious experience it is its
unity. Others, like Bogen (1969), have held that this is a
bogus notion undermined by the split-brain studies.
But if one does not start with the assumption that each
normal organism has one center of conscious percep-
tion, and if one also recognizes that unity is not the
same as unicity - i.e., singleness - then one can sepa-
rate the question of whether consciousness must be
unified from the question of whether there can be only
one such conscious center per organism. And once one
does make this distinction, it is clear that conscious
unity is compatible with duality as well as with unicity.
For, as the model illustrates, there can be unity of
conscious experience for each viewer, even though
there are two such viewers in adjoining booths. So long
as the arrangement described persists, it would not
matter if the booths formed a mobile unit roving the
football field; each viewer would still have no reason to
suspect the existence of the other.
Evolutionary considerations
But why this duplication of conscious experience? At
first sight it seems incredibly wasteful on nature's part,
which is, no doubt, one reason why so many astute
observers have resisted the conclusion that double
representation of the sensory field in the two hemi-
spheres amounts to double consciousness.
Roger Sperry (1962) was apparently the first to
ponder why there was such "symmetrical reciprocity"
THE BEHAVIORAL AND BRAIN SCIENCES (1981). 4 95
Puccetti: Mental duality
in the largely homotopic (from homologous left-right
points on the cortical surface) callosal cross-connections
of fibers. Several years later (Sperry 1970) he again
questioned the functional purpose of this "extreme
right-left redundancy" but still had no answer.
Recently Gazzaniga and LeDoux (1978) have raised
the problem anew. Their answer is that "interhemis-
pheric duplication provides for mental unity" (p. 17).
But, as we have just seen, unity in the sense of
consciousness constituting a unified whole does not
preclude duality with unity in each hemisphere. A
further passage on the same page by Gazzaniga and
LeDoux describes the contralateral duplication effect
and then adds that in this way "each half brain is thus
provided with nearly simultaneous representations of
both sensory spheres, and interhemispheric equilib-
rium is achieved." But then what these authors mean
by "unity" is really mental unisonance of sensory
representation in the two cerebral hemispheres, assur-
ing that they will have unisonous experience of the
extracorporeal world by having qualitatively (not
quantitatively or numerically) identical representations
of objects in it. It is like the difference between saying
that two tap dancers perform in perfect unison on the
stage and saying that they are really only one dancer.
Yet Gazzaniga and LeDoux (1978) on this same page
draw the following conclusion: "Therefore, we view
interhemispheric communication as the mechanism by
which the illusion of a single, complete psychological
space is created from two separate neural representa-
tions of the same information" (p. 17).
Illusion? But surely what each hemisphere sees is
real enough. If there is any illusion here, it is only the
illusion each hemisphere has that it alone perceives and
acts on those perceptions.
Nevertheless Gazzaniga and LeDoux (1978) make a
valuable contribution toward explaining the evolution-
ary rationale for interhemispheric duplication. Given
the basic vertebrate design of evolving a neural
network along the backbone that terminates in two
ganglia or brains near the anterior and feeding end of
the animal, consider how much worse off such species
would be without commissural connections between
them.
A paleoniscid swims in its prehistoric aquarium in
search of food. A suitable prey is detected in the right
visual field, moving rapidly to the left. Before the
primitive vertebrate can change its course, the prey
crosses the visual midline and enters the left visual
field. Because the optic projections of the fish are
[completely] crossed, the right visual field is seen by
the right eye and the left half-brain, and vice-versa.
Does that mean that when the prey moves out of one
visual field and into the other, the neural control over
the chase switches from an informed to a naive
half-brain? Hardly! (p. 10)
But the point can be driven deeper than this. Not
only would valuable time be lost if each ganglion had
to register the prey in turn, but what would happen if
the prey were moving laterally to the predator and thus
remained in a single visual field? If the informed half
brain seized control of the channels for motor activity,
the naive hemisphere would find itself being dragged
96 THE BEHAVIORAL AND BRAIN SCIENCES (1981), 4
off in its blind direction without being perceptually
aroused to the attack. How much more efficient it is if
nature wires in a relay system so that each half brain
sees the same visual target in the same place in extra-
bodily space at almost the same time.
But then this gives us the beginning of an answer to
the question of why, despite rich interhemispheric
connections, neither half brain has introspective access
to the conscious contents of the other. If they did have
such access, making one piscine mind spanning the two
half brains, any single visual target would (again, unless
there is some fusing mechanism we have no evidence
for) be seen twice, side by side, in which case the
ensuing attack would have only a fifty-fifty chance of
success. So the rule with backboned animals right from
the start seems to have been that with two half brains
there must be (1) a commissural relay system that
ensures interganglionic duplication of sensory effects,
and (2) a confinement of conscious unity to each
hemisphere, to avoid the disastrous doubling of the
sensory field at a conscious level. In other words, there
must be output from each half brain that becomes
input representing the ipsilateral half of body space in
the contralateral hemisphere, but no single conscious-
ness embracing both neural ganglia. The illusion of
unicity, or singleness, is thus preserved in each half
brain because it goes hand in hand with maximizing
the evolutionary advantage of the former and with
minimizing the evolutionary disadvantage of the latter.
In subsequent vertebrate evolution this basic game plan
is modified, for example in binocular species in which
half the retinal fibers from each eye are sent to one
hemisphere and half to the other, but it is never
abandoned, not even in talkative Homo sapiens.
Mute hemispheric cooperativeness in man: An
enigma resolved
But perhaps in humans, just because they talk, what I
have called the "illusion of unicity" is present only
unilaterally. This would help to explain something that
should have puzzled those who work with split-brain
patients but seems to have gone unremarked in the
literature. Let me illustrate exactly what I mean.
Here is an excerpt from a transcript published by
Sperry et al. (1979) in their report on testing for social
and self-awareness in the mute hemisphere of split-
brain subjects. The patient L.B., wearing a corneal
occluder on one eye, the other being covered with a
blindfold, is examining an array of four pictures that
can be seen only by the right, mute hemisphere; he has
been asked to point with the left hand to any picture he
recognizes. He points to a picture of Hitler and signals
disapproval with a "thumbs-down" gesture of that left
hand, but since the speaking, left hemisphere sees
nothing, he cannot say of what or whom he disap-
proves. Allowed now to guess, we get this exchange
between the temporarily blinded verbal hemisphere of
L.B. and the examiner:
Ex: "That's another 'thumbs-down'?"
LB: "Guess I'm antisocial." (Because this was his
third consecutive "thumbs-down.")
Ex: "Who is it?"

LB: "GI came to mind. I mean . . . " Subject at this
point was seen to be tracing letters with the first
finger of the left hand on the back of his right hand.
Ex: "You're writing with your left hand; let's keep
the cues out."
LB: "Sorry about that."
Ex: "Is it someone you know personally . . . or from
entertainment... or historical, or . . .?"
LB: interrupted and said "Historical."
Ex: "Recent or . . .?"
LB: "Past."
Ex: "This country or another country?"
LB: "Uh-huh-okay."
Ex: "You're not sure?"
LB: "Another country, I think."
Ex: "Prime Minister, king, president, . . . any of
them?"
LB: "Gee," and pondered with accompanying lip
movements for several seconds.
Ex: Giving further clues: "Great Britain? . . .
Germany? . . ."
LB: interrupted and said definitely "Germany"
and then after a slight pause added "Hitler." (p.
160)
This transcript reveals the overt cues, such as the
finger of the left hand tracing a G on the back of the
right hand. What it cannot reveal is the covert cues, the
emotional response spreading from right to left via
subcortical mechanisms as the word historical registers
in the right hemisphere, a response not generated by
"someone you know personally" or "from entertain-
ment." If that doesn't come across quickly or clearly
enough to the speaking hemisphere, as when L.B. is
asked "This country or another country?", he plays
dumb until the question is repeated and he gets a
firmer response to "another country." Then, at the end,
combining memory of an initial "thumbs-down" signal
of disapproval by the left hand with cues that the
picture is of a historical German figure, it is an easy
inference to the correct answer: Hitler.
When pressed, the disconnected verbal hemisphere
of the split-brain patient will actually claim possession
of the knowledge it is trying to guess successfully with
the assistance of its silent cerebral companion. Here
L.B., in the same transcript, confronts a picture of his
mother seen only by the mute right hemisphere.
Ex: "Do you know who it is?"
LB: "Uh-huh," in an affirmative tone.
Ex: "Can you name it? Who is it?" When subject
hadn't answered after several seconds examiner
added "Don't know who?"
LB: "I know who, but I can't verbalize it."
Ex: "Can you give the name?"
LB: "I know I can spell it but you won't let me
spell." (p. 162)
But of course the speaking L.B. cannot spell the
name with the preferred right hand. If he could, he
would simply spell out loud "M-O-M." His left hand
could spell it out, under control of the right hemi-
sphere, which does not talk, but the examiner will not
allow this. Yet the verbal half brain insists it has this
knowledge, under the surface somewhere, and implies
that there is no other conscious center that has it. Nor is
Puccetti: Mental duality
L.B. unusual in this regard. As far as I know, not a
single split-brain patient has ever acknowledged what
seems so obvious to those who work with them. Even
when complaining about an uncooperative or rebel-
lious left hand that does such things as slapping them
awake when oversleeping in the morning (Dimond
1977), it is always the hand or arm itself that cannot be
trusted.
Now many readers may see affinities here with the
unilateral neglect syndrome (Denny-Brown et al. 1952;
Battersby et al. 1956; Weinstein & Cole 1963), which
usually, though not always (Welman 1969), involves
neglect of the left side of the body. Unfortunately for
such a suggestion, however, both cause and effects
characteristic of that syndrome are absent in the split-
brain patient. ° The latter does not have parietal lesions
in the right hemisphere. He is agnostic about left-sided
visual space, but for the very good reason that, without
an intact commissural relay system, the left, speaking
hemisphere cannot see anything to the left of fixation.
And of course he is neither asomatagnostic nor anosog-
nostic for the left side of his body. He does not sit on his
right buttock exclusively, chew food only on that side
of his mouth, refer to his left body half as sinister, or
refuse to heed you if you approach him from that side.
Nor does he, when drawing a bilaterally symmetrical
figure, tend to crowd all its features over to the right
side (although he copies such figures poorly with the
right hand, doing better with the left hand under
control of the disconnected right hemisphere). The two
syndromes are far apart.
But to return to our transcript, contrast L.B.'s left-
hemisphere behavior with the right hemisphere's. It
seems incredible that the mute hemisphere just
continues, as in a game of charades, faithfully cuing the
speaking hemisphere, even though it can hear the
latter's outspoken denials (it has adequate language
comprehension for this), not only of its assistance in
getting the right answers, but of its very existence! Yet
there is no behavioral manifestation whatever of
resentment, even after years of this kind of testing and
treatment. Why?
An answer consistent with the hypothesis of mental
duality in the normal human brain suggests itself. The
nonspeaking hemisphere has known the true state of
affairs from a very tender age. It has known this
because beginning at age two or three it heard speech
emanating from the common body that, as language
development on the left proceeded, became too
complex grammatically and syntactically for it to
believe it was generating; the same, of course, for what
it observed the preferred hand writing down in school
through the years. Postsurgically, little has changed for
this mute hemisphere (other than loss of sensory infor-
mation about the ipsilateral half of bodily space). It
does find that it can now sometimes undertake an
independent action with the left arm or leg, when its
vocal partner is distracted, asleep, or otherwise off
guard. But on the whole it still has no way of expressing
itself except through a nervous system much under the
control of another. Being inured to this status as cere-
bral helot, it goes along. Thankless cooperation can
become a way of life.
THE BEHAVIORAL AND BRAIN SCIENCES (1981), 4 97
Puccetti: Mental duality
It may be objected that here I am reading a lot into
L.B.'s mental states on both sides of the disconnected
brain. That is true, but what are the alternatives? Let us
look briefly at two of these.
First, there is the view of Sir John Eccles (Popper &
Eccles 1977) that the mute cerebral hemisphere of the
split-brain patient simply doesn't have any mental
states but is a kind of automaton. But in that case we
have to wonder how L.B.'s right hemisphere was able
to "see" the picture of Hitler, "hear" the examiner's
hints, "react" to some of them emotionally at subcorti-
cal levels, and even "think" to trace the letter G on the
back of L.B.'s right hand, all unconsciously!
Second, there are those who say that, for all we
know, each hemisphere is a collection of conscious
centers (Nagel 1971), and that what the split-brain
experiments show is that "multiple selves" are
concealed within each of us (LeDoux & Gazzaniga
1980, in press). What this overlooks is the clear display
of inJrahemispheric, as opposed to mterhemispheric,
unity revealed in the above transcript excerpt. In order
for the left hemisphere of L.B. to generate verbal
behavior involving reasoning, selecting, and acting on
cues about the identity of the picture, a large number
of discrete neural mechanisms within that hemisphere
have to function in an integrated, sequential manner.
And the same can be said for the nonverbal behavior
generated by a complex of neural mechanisms in L.B.'s
mute right hemisphere. That these neural complexes
should so function when each such neural mechanism
is the biological substrate of a basically autonomous 'l-hemisphere-R
"mind" or "self" may be logically possible, but it is
grossly improbable as a means of explaining the behav- Figure 1. Schematic drawing showing transfer of visual
ioral integration stemming from each side of L.B.'s information from one side of the brain to the other via the
split brain. optic chiasm and the corpus callosum. (LGB =» lateral genicu-
late body.) Reprinted, by permission, from Eccles (1976) p.
167.

Two kinds of bitemporal visual defects

The thesis of mental duality is by no means bereft of
empirical consequences. I have proposed elsewhere
(Puccetti 1977) how the theory could be tested, but it
would be surprising if the literature did not already
contain evidence supporting it, evidence that has gone
unnoticed because no one was looking for it.
As can be seen from Figure 1, there are two points in
the human CNS (central nervous system) at which
visual information crosses over from one side of the
body to the other: the optic chiasm and the corpus
callosum. (The anterior commissure, not shown here,
may also transfer visual information, but it too is
sectioned in complete cerebral commissurotomy.)
Now in forebrain commissurotomy for the relief of
epilepsy, sectioning of the corpus callosum and lesser
commissures leaves the optic chiasm untouched. One
of the effects is to produce a permanent double hemi-
anopia - i.e., blindness in each hemisphere for the ipsi-
lateral visual half field. Recently this was demonstrated
by Bogen and Vogel (1975) in a long-term follow-up of
ten split-brain patients seen four to ten years postopera-
tively.
The demonstration is really quite simple. You stand
at arm's length from the patient and have him fixate
visually on your eyes or nose. Then you bring your
hands up to shoulder height and ask him either to say
when he notices the fingers of a hand wriggling or to
signal this by raising an arm or hand on the same side
as the wriggling fingers. If he is right-handed, the
result is uniform. He says he saw the fingers wriggling
only when they are to his right, and lifts his arm or
hand only when they are to his left. In other words, the
verbal hemisphere sees only to the right of fixation, as
the mute hemisphere sees only to the left of fixation.
Now consider a comparable defect caused by a
break at the line under 2 in Figure 2. Here the optic
chiasm alone is cut, but this also leads to blindness in
the temporal eye fields.
The question may now be raised, is there anything
about these two kinds of bitemporal visual deficit that
would be predictable on the theory that consciousness
is doubly organized in the normal brain?
Of course there is, for double consciousness in the
normal brain is predicated, as we saw, on interhemi-
spheric duplication of the sensory field via the commis-
sural relay system without the duplicated contents
fusing into a single conscious percept. If that were true,
then the commissurotomy subject would display his
defect when tested with both eyes open, because the
surgery has abolished the duplication effect. And this,
as the Bogen-Vogel test shows, is indeed the case.

98 THE BEHAVIORAL AND BRAIN SCIENCES (1981), 4


TOO
Figure 2. Schematic drawing showing effects of fiber
disruptions on subjective eye fields. Optic chiasm cut and
consequent bitemporal blindness (black areas in circles) are
illustrated by 2. Reprinted, by permission, from Harrington
(1976), Figure 7-1, 4th edition.
But what about the chiasmal-lesioned patient? In his
case the duplication effect has not been abolished,
because the commissural relay system is still function-
ing. If so, he will not show, as the split-brain patient
did, double hemianopia or the bitemporal visual defect
when he has both eyes open, but only when each eye is
tested separately. And that is precisely the result.
When a chiasmal subject is presented with an Ishihara
plate (used to test for color blindness, numbers being
composed of dots of a slightly different color than the
background dots), on which the number 27 is
displayed, this will be reported as a 2 if the right eye is
being tested alone, as the single number 8 is reported as
a 3 when the left eye alone is tested (Baker & Baker
1977,1, 4, p. 16).
On the theory being considered, this outcome is to be
expected, because the right, temporal half retina of the
right eye will pick up the 2, which will be sent to the
left hemisphere after it has been seen in the mute, right
hemisphere, whereas the 7 striking the left or nasal
hemiretina cannot also reach the speaking, left hemi-
sphere due to the chiasmal disruption. And the same
with the left eye's left or temporal half retina picking
up the right half of the 8 and sending it directly to the
left hemisphere for verbal report, whereas the left half
of the same number cannot, given the chiasmal lesion,
reach the right, mute hemisphere for registration and
subsequent relay to the left, speaking hemisphere.
But then it is easy to see why the same defect cannot
be revealed when both eyes are open. Suppose it is the
number 27, again, being presented on the Ishihara
Commentary/Puccetti: Mental duality
plate. As before, the 2 will be picked up by the
temporal or right hemiretina of the right eye, seen in
the right hemisphere, and relayed to the left hemi-
sphere, where it is seen a second time. The 7, on the
other hand, will strike the temporal or left hemiretina
of the left eye and go directly to join the 2 in the left
hemisphere for verbal report. So the chiasmal patient
with both eyes open will say, correctly, that the
number displayed was 27; the right hemisphere of the
same patient, if it could report independently, would
concur in this, since it got the 2 directly from the right
or temporal half of the right eye's retina, and the 7 seen
in the left eye's temporal or left hemiretina was sent
over to it from the left hemisphere. (The split-brain
patient, of course, would say the number is 7, while his
left hand would point to 2 in an array of numbers
including 2 and 27.) Clinical and experimental neurol-
ogy support this finding, since patients with pituitary
tumors disrupting the optic chiasm, as well as chiasm-
sectioned cat preparations, do not show a bitemporal
defect unless vision is obstructed in one of the eyes and
then in the other (Bogen 1980).
In conclusion, I do not see how, on the conventional
view of the integrative, unifying function of the corpus
callosum with regard to conscious experience, it could
be predicted that the commissurally disrupted subject
would display a bitemporal visual defect with both
eyes open, whereas the chiasmally disrupted subject
with both eyes open can still see across the vertical
meridian. On the view, however, that the function of
the corpus callosum is to duplicate conscious experi-
ence on both sides of the brain, without subsequent
fusion, such an outcome is clearly predictable. The case
for mental duality rests.
NOTE
"The following phrase was added by the author after the
target article was circulated to commentators and conse-
quently was not seen by them: "except in the immediate
postoperative recovery period, which may, however, be
attributable to retraction of the right hemisphere (and subse-
quent edema and intracranial pressure) in order to section the
corpus callosum."
Open Peer Commentary
Commentaries submitted by the qualified professional readership
of this journal will be considered for publication in a later issue as
Continuing Commentary on this article.
Sensory suppression and the unity of
consciousness
Robert M. Anderson, Jr. and Joseph F. Gonsalves
Neuropsychology Service, Hawaii State Hospital, Kaneohe, Hawaii 96744
Dr. Puccetti advances the thesis that there is a separate center
of consciousness associated with each cerebral hemisphere.
Each hemisphere has its own visual experience, with half of
the visual field registering in striate cortex (area 17) and half
in prestriate cortex (area 18), which receives a projection
THE BEHAVIORAL AND BRAIN SCIENCES (1981), 4 99
Commentary/Puccetti: Mental duality
from the contralateral area 17. On this hypothesis, it follows
that a person with a complete lesion of areas 17 and 18 of the
left hemisphere whose language capacity is on the left would
report that he is blind. Although the left center of conscious-
ness would probably have access to visual information from
the contralateral hemisphere, and therefore would have some
visual knowledge (Weiskrantz et al. 1974), since it would not
share experience with the right center of consciousness it
would have no visual experience to report. In reviewing the
literature, we have not found a case of complete destruction
of the left occipital cortex. Partial lesions, however, suggest
that such an injury would result in a report of blindness only
in the right half field rather than in a complete lack of visual
experience (Teuber et al. 1960; Harrington 1971).
Puccetti insists that advocates of the unitary model of
consciousness provide a mechanism to account for the fusion
of experience across hemispheres. The axonal connections via
the corpus callosum are obvious candidates for the neural
substrate underlying such a fusion mechanism. Although just
how Puccetti might object to this claim is not clear, he could
argue that consciousness occurs only in connection with
cortical sheets of crisscrossing dendritic fibers (Anderson &
Leong, in preparation). Experience, however, contradicts this
claim. The visual, auditory, and tactile modalities overlap in
experience and are held in one unity of consciousness. You
can see a book and then reach out and touch it; the experi-
ences overlap and correlate with one another in making up a
common perceptual space. Choreography is an art form
whose essence involves the intimate connection between
audition and vision - music and dance. Although these
modalities are unified in consciousness, they are located in
disparate regions of the brain. Thus the mechanism providing
this unity must involve the white fiber cortico-cortico (or
subcortical) connections running between these areas. If
intermodal unity is accomplished by white-fiber connections,
then it is even more likely that intramodal fusion could be
accomplished by commissural axonal connections.
Puccetti explicates his hypothesis of two separate centers of
visual awareness by drawing an analogy with two side-by-side
observers of a football game. Each observer has a direct view
of half the field and a TV view of the other half. The views
are next to one another. By analogy, in the occipital area of
each hemisphere a representation of half of the visual field in
area 18 is juxtaposed with (but does not interact significantly
with) a representation of the other half field in area 17. This
bifurcated model of visual experience fails to account for the
phenomenon of sensory suppression.
In sensory suppression one side of the body is first stimu-
lated via one of the bilateral sensory modalities (tactile,
auditory, or visual). A subject may be stimulated in the visual
modality, as required in the Halstead-Reitan Neuropsycho-
logical Battery, by having the subject face the experimenter
and fixate the experimenter's nose (Reitan & Davison 1974).
The experimenter, who is holding his arms outstretched on
both sides, stimulates the subject by wiggling the fingers of his
right hand; the subject should say "left," since the stimulus is
on the subject's left side. The body is then stimulated at a
mirror-image point on its contralateral side. In our example,
the experimenter wiggles the fingers of the left hand, and the
subject should say "right." Finally, the body is stimulated on
both sides simultaneously; the experimenter wiggles the
fingers of both hands, and the subject should say "both."
Sensory suppression occurs in subjects (especially those with
damage to the parietal area) who identify the stimulation on
either side alone, but who experience it only on the side
ipsilateral to their brain damage when stimulated on both.
Visual suppression can be so profound in some patients that a
spot of light experienced in the half field contralateral to the
brain damage is experienced to vanish when a spot of light is
introduced into the half field ipsilateral to the damage
100 THE BEHAVIORAL AND BRAIN SCIENCES (1981), 4
(Bender & Furlow 1945). It is important to note that the
problem the subject is having is not one of not being able to
report the occurrence of an experience; the experience itself
is absent.
Visual suppression may be comfortably explained on the
hypothesis that there is one unitary consciousness. On the
unitary hypothesis, we can speculate that visual experience is
due to the integration of visual input at higher levels of neural
processing. Each area 18, rather than being a projection area
corresponding to its contralateral area 17, integrates informa-
tion from area 17 on both sides of the brain (Cowey 1964;
Luria 1966), and this bilateral integration is continued at even
higher levels. When visual suppression occurs, the visual
signal from the eye contralateral to the brain damage is
weakened, while the signal from the other eye is unchanged.
The stronger signal biases the gain on the entire integrated
field of visual experience so that the threshold is too high for
the weaker signal to register. The weaker signal is masked by
background noise. The weaker signal can be experienced in
the absence of the stronger since the threshold would not be
too high.
This kind of explanation is not available to Puccetti since he
has bifurcated consciousness and visual experience. For
Puccetti, the areas 17 and 18 of each hemisphere are separate
though contiguous visual input processing stations. He would
have to conclude, therefore, that if each of these projection
areas functioned properly alone to produce a visual experi-
ence, then, when they are simultaneously stimulated, they
should both yield visual experiences - contrary to the visual
suppression phenomenon. Thus, Puccetti's model of sensory
consciousness appears to be inconsistent with the phenome-
non of sensory suppression.
Mental numerosity: Is one head better than
two?
Joseph E. Bogen
Ross-Loos Medical Group, Los Angeles. Calif. 90026
For all my pleasure in the company of Wigan (1844) and
Puccetti, there are important differences. My main differ-
ence with Wigan is based on the facts (unknown to him) of
hemispheric specialization. Rather than suppose, as he did,
that the greater interest lies in what makes the hemispheres
asynchronous, I believe (as does Puccetti) that they are
necessarily disparate (as a result of their specializations, as
well as some asymmetries of input) and that the most interest-
ing questions concern the various sources of integration or
"unisonance."
My main difference with Puccetti, as he says in his target
article, is expressed in his clause "it is difficult to make sense
of the idea of one person's having two minds. " This differ-
ence arises partly out of philosophic considerations, which he
leaves aside in the article. But while Puccetti believes that
"duality of mind" is not strong enough (Puccetti 1973) and so
finds no discomfort in defending it, "duality of mind" is just a
shade too strong for me. My reservations can be summed up
in the following proposition: Having two hemispheres each in
a separate head is not the same as having two hemispheres in
the same head. And this holds whether or not the interhemi-
spheric integrating mechanisms in the same head include the
cerebral commissures.
As noted by Marks (1980), no one nowadays doubts
Wigan's original point - that one hemisphere is enough for a
mind "comfortably characterizable as human" (p. 47). Can
two hemispheres, then, be enough for two minds? When they
are in separate heads, the answer is clearly "yes." But what if
they are in the same head?

Unlike two hemispheres in two different heads, the discon-
nected hemispheres are (and have been) always in the same
place at the same time, have the same circulating environ-
ment (blood and CSF), and communicate a great deal subcal-
losally. The last includes, by the way, a visual cross-communi-
cation that is not mentioned in Puccetti's text (although
illustrated in his Figure 2). A related simplification is his not
mentioning that testing, either for homonymous hemianopsia
(with both eyes open) or for bitemporal hemianopsia (with
each eye separately), gives results that depend upon the
particular stimuli that are used. (Trevarthen & Sperry 1973;
Weiskrantz et al. 1974).
The subcallosal connections make a difference in other
ways. For example, the duality of cognition demonstrable in
the human split brain seems not to be accompanied by so
great a disparity of affect (Cazzaniga & LeDoux 1978;
Sperry, Zaidel, & Zaidel 1979), perhaps because the two
limbic systems are so tightly coupled at the hypothalamic
level. Furthermore, both human hemispheres, whether in the
intact or the split condition, are probably asleep and awake
simultaneously, just as they are in the split-brain cat (Berlu-
cchi 1966a; Berlucchi 1966b) unless there is a sagittal section
of the brain stem (Michel & Roffwarg 1967; Michel 1972).
There is no evidence that primate hemispheres (in the same
head) can alternate sleep and waking, as do cetacean hemi-
spheres (Serafetinides, Shurley & Brooks 1972; Mukhametov,
Supin & Polyakov 1977).
What most people, following Sperry (1968, 1970, 1977;
Ellenberg & Sperry 1980), seem to believe is that the corpus
callosum is what makes us unified. In that view, dividing the
corpus callosum "splits the mind" into two, whereas it was
previously one. Would restoring the commissures reverse this
process? Or, put differently, would adding 200 million bridg-
ing nerve fibers render a previously complicated situation
(mental duality) more simple? In my view, the big difference
between two hemispherectomized persons and us, with two
brains in one head, is the presence of all those other integra-
tive influences; adding the commissures adds relatively less.
Indeed, adding the commissures, with their potential for
inhibition, may complicate hemispheric interaction more
than it synchronizes. We might even suspect that the mental
numerosity of the intact brain is greater than that of the split,
rather than less (though perhaps not so great as that of the
dolphin).
If numerosity of mind were a continuum, or were even
fractionally quantizable, it might be easier to describe the
split brain (and others of us). As it is, our current language
forces us to jump one way or the other. Between "one mind"
and "two minds" to describe either the splits or the intact,
"two minds" seems to me much closer to the mark.
Puccetti uses "homuncular" language, as he says, for lack
of a better alternative. (Do "unicity" and "unisonance" really
help?) Until we have a better vocabulary we are stuck with
anthropomorphizing the hemispheres and with the resistance
that such usage must necessarily elicit in those who know that
they are (whatever their problems) better unified than any
pair of people with hemispherectomy. Puccetti concludes,
"The case for mental duality rests." In fact, it has a long way
yet to go.
In two minds
John L. Bradshaw
Department of Psychology, Monash University, Clayton, Victoria 3168,
Australia
Puccetti denies that the role of the commissures is to inte-
grate a duality of consciousness into a simple unitary
stream. He claims that even normal, noncommissurotomized
Commentary/Puccetti: Mental duality
subjects have "experienced" a duality of consciousness
throughout life, and that our mute right hemisphere has
become inured over the years to the thankless task of being a
silent companion. Thus he argues that with regard to vision, a
split brain does not of itself produce a divided mind (the latter
being already divided), but merely deprives the two minds of
visual input for the ipsilateral half field.
While I agree that one must separate the question of
whether consciousness must be unified from the question of
whether there can be only one such conscious center per
organism, I do not believe that Puccetti adequately discounts
the idea that each hemisphere is perhaps itself a collection of
conscious centers. Is there such intrahemispheric unity as
Puccetti believes? Why should we not impute mental func-
tions to parts of a brain, each of us being perhaps a mosaic of
personalities? Indeed, we are not always sure of the reasons
for our actions or even for our emotional responses. Psycho-
analysis abounds with descriptions of well intentioned, self-
deceptive, confabulatory accounts by the patient of his
actions and emotional states. (Incidentally, is there anything
so strange, as Puccetti apparently finds, in the disconnected
verbal hemisphere of a commissurotomy patient actually
claiming possession of the knowledge which it is trying to
guess with the overt, covert, or "unintentional" assistance of
its silent cerebral companion? Korsakoff patients similarly
confabulate constantly, in apparent good faith, as do normal
subjects in subsequently "explaining" their actions performed
under posthypnotic suggestion). Is there any reason why we
all should not have a number of nonverbal cognitive,
emotional, and memory systems, a mosaic of subconscious
processors, loosely intercoordinated, perhaps, like a colony of
polyps on a coral or cells in a sponge? We are often a
battleground of competing desires, whims and drives, part
wanting to do one thing, part wanting another.
Such an account, of course, sees this personality mosaic as
being manifest more at the unconscious than at the conscious
(and rational) level, which is, of course, Puccetti's primary
concern; but that itself raises another question: What is the
dividing line between conscious and unconscious? Is there a
continuum? Surely consciousness is not an all-or-nothing
phenomenon. Given various levels of consciousness (witness
demonstrations ranging from subliminal perception and
hypnosis to work on selective attention and recent studies on
the processing of unattended inputs, as reviewed, e.g., by
Underwood, 1975, and the various manifestations of demen-
tia), it is not implausible to talk about a mosaic of conscious (as
well as unconscious) "selves."
Commissurotomy patients do indeed appear, under certain
experimental circumstances, to behave as if they possessed a
duality of consciousness, and this may even be the case.
Normal subjects may also, as discussed above, have multiple
processing and emotional systems operating largely at a
preconscious level; but these people normally claim to
possess - and behave as if they possessed - only one sense of
conscious personal identity. One possible explanation (which
Puccetti rejects) is that this is a consequence of the integrative
(or, alternatively, inhibitory) role of the intact commissures.
Another explanation is that conscious voluntary activities
either reside in or are somehow mediated by or orchestrated
by some mechanism in a dominant left hemisphere. This
account is also rejected by Puccetti. A further possibility is
that undivided, midbrain attentional systems assign func-
tional processing to one or the other hemisphere. This account
would suggest that there is never a double stream of
consciousness, but at most merely a fluctuating cognitive
style. It would, however, be subject to criticisms similar to
those that Puccetti raises against imputing conscious integra-
tion to forebrain commissural systems.
Perhaps the most interesting account, one that is not
considered by Puccetti and that looks beyond interhemis-
THE BEHAVIORAL AND BRAIN SCIENCES (1981), 4 101
Commentary/Puccetti: Mental duality
pheric (left/right) systems to intrahemispheric (mosaic orga-
nization) ones, would argue that whatever neural subsystem
currently had access to response or output processes would
automatically attain a level of conscious self-awareness. Stud-
ies of choice reaction time performed within the framework
of information theory suggest that response uncertainty (i.e.,
response selection) is more important than stimulus uncer-
tainty (i.e., stimulus identification) in determining response
times (see, e.g., Keele 1973). While we can, with practice,
come to process many discrete inputs simultaneously, albeit
often preconsciously and often incompletely, we generally
cannot simultaneously initiate two different sets of responses,
unless they can somehow be integrated into a single, compos-
ite, higher-order movement. (Incidentally, it is perhaps no
accident that the neural system in a verbal animal that
normally has readiest access to an output mechanism is the
verbal left hemisphere.) On this account, consciousness
appears to be tied to deliberate, voluntary motor outflow.
Indeed, there is no convincing evidence that commissurotomy
patients can do several things at once any better than normals
(who can, as we have seen, themselves simultaneously moni-
tor, and in part process, several input streams).
In summary, I would argue that whatever may be true in
the unusual case of commissurotomy patients, in the case of
normal people, although many automatic and largely precon-
scious processors may simultaneously handle inputs to various
levels of completion, there is usually only a single level of
conscious self-identity; this is tied to those output systems
which are currently dealing with information at the hierar-
chically highest level.
Puccetti argues that, given the vertebrate ground plan of
two half brains linked by commissures, with each getting
input from either side of body space, conscious units must be
confined to each hemisphere (rather than residing in any
unpaired higher or lower structure) to avoid doubling of the
sensory field at conscious levels. However, this argument
itself presupposes a whole hierarchy of as-yet-unresolved
issues. (1) Why should vertebrates be "fitted" with two such
half brains? We cannot just invoke the two sides of body space
(even though this is itself an advance upon the traditional
account, in which the brain serves to map the receptor
surfaces). (2) Why is the brain/body representation contrala-
terally organized? (3) Why are so many vertebrates at least
slightly asymmetrical? (4) Why is man perhaps excessively
so? (5) Do man's measured perceptual asymmetries reflect
transcommissural transmission times, transcommissural signal
degradation, the effect of attentional biases, or differential
decoding capacities in the two hemispheres? (6) Why are
asymmetries often less apparent in females and sinistrals? [See
McGlone: "Sex Differences in Brain Asymmetry" BBS 3(2)
1980.] (7) Why is the left hemisphere usually dominant for
verbal and time-dependent functions in man? What is the
evolutionary relation between these two classes of function, or
is the relation purely fortuitous?
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
This work was completed while the author was on study leave at the
University of Victoria.
Structural levels and mental unity
Jason W. Brown
Department of Neurology, New York University Medical Center, New York,
N.Y. 10016
Puccetti thinks he has a theory when he has simply restated a
few observations. Whether commissurotomy splits the mind
in two; whether it disconnects or permits access to each of two
102 THE BEHAVIORAL AND BRAIN SCIENCES (1981), 4
independent minds; whether there is a primitive or highly
developed but mute consciousness in the right hemisphere or
an automaton - these questions are of interest only if it can be
established that splits are possessed of mental duality in the
first place. This is really the fundamental issue. The demon-
stration of dual visual processing is not a demonstration of
mental duality; otherwise, the presence of several visual areas
within a hemisphere, or even the iteration of orientation slabs
in area 17, would also be evidence for (potentially) multiple
conscious states. The many difficulties with the "homuncu-
lar" approach are not confronted by Puccetti but finessed on
the pretext that everyone does it, and besides, there is no
alternative. Is this really the case?
Consider the description of "double hemianopia" in callo-
sal patients. Puccetti accepts the conventional view that each
hemisphere "sees" only the contralateral field. Bogen is cited,
but one of his patients, and probably others, responded
"both" and pointed sequentially with the right arm to simul-
taneous cross-field targets. This indicates that at least some
splits can access ipsilateral visual stimuli. This behavior is
usually explained in terms of cross-cuing and/or uncrossed
motor systems. Yet there is evidence (Trevarthen 1974; Holtz-
man et al. 1980) that each hemisphere in the split has access to
a unitary visual field. Lesion studies have also been inter-
preted to indicate that midbrain-tegmental mechanisms
construct a unified percept of the two half fields (Denny-
Brown & Fischer 1976). Disorders of space perception and
abnormal image formation that occur with tegmental lesions
do not show a half-field preference. There is also a literature
on vision in hemianopic fields dating from the work of Bard
(1905).
Such observations point to a unitary or shared visual field at
some early level, and make untenable a model of perception
that begins with a stage of information processing at the level
of striate cortex. The fact is that - whatever one's interpreta-
tion of the commissurotomy work - before we can be too
confident about its meaning for a theory of perception, or
consciousness, we need a much better idea of what is really
going on when - or before - the word teacup registers in the
occipital lobes. Indeed, an argument can be made that
perception at the occipital stage represents an end point in
visual processing, that object formation proceeds from a
unitary pre-object in a viewer-centered space toward modali-
ty-specificity and hemianopic exteriorization (Brown 1977).
In fact, such an account can better explain consciousness in
relation to hallucinatory, dream, and transitional states,
subliminal perception experiments, state-dependent learning,
and the denial and "blind sight" of pathological cases. At any
rate, every altered state of consciousness should not require a
different model of perception.
In my view, the commissurotomy data can be approached
in terms of a unitary system of levels rather than parallel
processes. Take, for example, the response asymmetries to the
work teacup, which, for Puccetti, demonstrate double
consciousness. Obviously, the use of compounds exaggerates
the effect. Would minimal lexical items, centrally fixated, be
retrieved from either hemisphere through an appropriate
technique - say, a forced choice paradigm? Would right-
hemisphere priming modify left-hemisphere responses?
Would hypnotic regression elicit verbal reports of right-
hemisphere presentations? Such effects are predicted by the
finding that words flashed to the right hemisphere of a split
are partly accessed in left-hemisphere verbalizations. Puccet-
ti's "Hitler" example maximizes the putative role of cross-
cuing and transfer of affective tonality. But this also occurs
with affectively neutral material - for example, the verbal-
ization "jump" when the word sit is presented to right
hemisphere (Nebes 1978). Occasional paraphasias of this type
also occur in the "right-hemisphere" readings of patients with
so-called pure or agnosic alexia, and are a core problem in the

interpretation of aphasic disorders.
Such observations suggest that right-hemisphere contents
are also present to some extent in the left hemisphere but are
"buried" at earlier processing stages. The verbalization in the
example above would reflect the degree of specification of a
target item through a semantic network. There is certainly
enough evidence from tracking studies, lexical decision tasks,
and the clinical material to justify the identification of
semantic processing with preliminary cognition. Moreover,
aphasia study confirms that the representation of word mean-
ings proceeds from an early, structurally older stage orga-
nized about symbolic, affective, and experiential relations to a
later conceptual stage (Brown 1979). This, the supposed
transfer of affective or connotative meaning from right to left
could also represent an early bihemispheric stage in lexical
selection.
These considerations suggest the presence of a shared
(preliminary) semantic representation in the split, with (end-
stage) phonological realization achieved primarily through
the left hemisphere. Left-hand pointing responses would tap
right-hemisphere events at a semantic level, whereas verbal-
ization or right-hand responses would tap left-hemisphere
events at a phonological level. Put differently, the left hemi-
sphere is disadvantaged in access to content preliminary in a
processing sequence. This differential access to preliminary
cognition gives rise, I believe, to all of these spurious right-
hemisphere effects. Incidentally, this implies that a compari-
son of left- and right-hand pointing responses should yield
some difference in the character of the movement, since
motor behavior no less than perception reflects cognitive
structure.
According to this account, commissural section does not
disclose preexisting dual consciousness but prevents the right-
hemisphere component of a shared cognitive level from being
derived for a left-hemisphere end stage. This may be due to
an interruption of flow from right to left, but there are other
possibilities. The procedure is really a type of pathological
lesion, not just of the callosum but of the neocortex. It would
not be surprising to find inhibition or elevation of thresholds
in homologous regions of the "disconnected" neocortex. [See
Denenberg: "Hemispheric Laterality in Animals and the
Effects of Early Experience" BBS 4(1) 1981, this issue]
Flicker fusion thresholds may be elevated in both visual fields
of partial callosal cases. Memory defects have been described.
However, the callosal lesion, like other pathologies, gives rise
to more than just a decrement in performance. Pathology
displays early processing. An aphasic symptom - for example,
a patient's saying or reading "jump" for "sit" - can be viewed
as an island of preliminary cognition exposed prematurely in
behavior. Conceivably, the effect of the callosal section is
such as to "trap" or fix the right hemisphere at a preliminary
stage, or otherwise prevent it from further processing. In
other words, what appears to be a separate mind in the right
hemisphere is a kind of ceiling on cognitive processing
imposed on that hemisphere by the callosal section.
The problem of denial, which is dismissed by Puccetti as
unrelated to right-hemisphere function, can be explained, I
believe, along similar lines - that is, on the view that a lesion
displays a preliminary object. The predilection for left hemi-
spatial neglect with right-hemisphere lesions would reflect
the incomplete access, of the (phonological, analytic) cogni-
tion of the left hemisphere to the truncated hemispatial
representation displayed by the right-sided lesion. In other
words, the cognitive end point of the subject cannot access
into awareness the unfilled void in the forming left hemifield.
The access problem is the inattention. Right hemispatial
neglect is infrequent with left posterior lesions because the
lesion, which is usually quite large, tends to involve regions
mediating phonological representation, and thus obviates the
access problem.
Commentary/Puccetti: Mental duality
In sum, the problem is considerably more complex than
suggested by Puccetti, who has not even tapped the surface of
the available material. And there are alternative accounts.
How many angels . . . ?
Patricia Smith Churchland
Department of Philosophy, University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, Manitoba,
Canada. R3T 2N2
The trouble with trying to calculate how many angels can
dance on the head of the proverbial pin, or how many demons
Father Michaelis dislodged from the body of a hysteric,1 is
that angels and demons are theoretically so ill defined that we
do not know how to begin to count, or what to take as a
reasonable estimate. In the absence of theory to provide
principles for individuating, one man's considered judgment
is another man's jest. Until quite recently, atoms and blood
types were in much the same plight, and what renders them
countable or estimable now is the respective theories that tell
us what atoms are, and what makes for differences in blood.
Until Cantor provided a theory of infinite sets, the business of
counting them, or ranking them with respect to size, was
tantamount to clawing at the air. The question of how much
information is transmitted in a given channel is now, thanks
to information theory, one that admits of an answer, but
before Shannon and Weaver it was strictly a guess-and-
by-golly affair. Counting angels and vital spirits never came
to much because angel hypotheses and vitalistic biology lost
out in the competition for theoretical acceptance. Now, I
suggest, "being conscious" is theoretically so ill defined at this
stage of mind-brain science, that counting centers of
consciousness is a bit like counting angels. Criteria deemed
pivotal for the counting debate, such as accessibility of
information and presurgical manifestation, seem to me to be
insufficiently motivated by accompanying theory to provide
a basis for productive argument.
Unquestionably, the results of split-brain research are of
great value in providing some insight into the functioning of
the brain. Nevertheless, if we are equipped with nothing
more substantial than a few pretheoretical intuitions (and
even these, it appears, conflict), then the attempt to interpret
these results either as inconsistent with a one-mind-per-brain
hypothesis, or as not, seems fun but inconsequential. The
paucity of theory concerning consciousness, let alone what a
center of consciousness is, makes it difficult indeed to know
what the debate is really about. Accordingly, while I do not
find Puccetti's hypothesis especially scandalous - indeed I
applaud his willingness to allow that there may be more going
on in awareness than meets the mind's eye - 1 am not
persuaded either, for I do not know what it amounts to.
Consider an analogous debate in the nineteenth century,
among those who thought there was just one vital spirit
pervading all living organisms, those who thought there
should be one for plants and one for animals, and those who
thought each organism, or each organism part, had its very
own vital spirit. For all its sound and fury, the debate did not
signify, leaving biology neither worse nor wiser. Lacking an
adequate framework within which to engage the question
empirically, the debate was merely an unavailing clash of a
priori hunches and proprietary interpretations of scanty
empirical data.
It is tempting, perhaps, to think that the case of being
conscious is special, and to suppose that principles of individ-
uation for centers of consciousness can be available in
advance of significant theory about states of consciousness. It
might seem that we already know a good deal about being
conscious by direct, nontheoretical acquaintance. The temp-
THE BEHAVIORAL AND BRAIN SCIENCES (1981), 4 103
Commentary/Puccetti: Mental duality
tation should be resisted, for there is no reason to suppose that
the brain evolved in such a way as to reveal much about how
it works from the inside. Whether there is anything going on
in the brain that corresponds to "unity of consciousness" or to
"center of consciousness" (inchoate as these notions are) is an
empirical question, and if our pretheoretical intuitions find
themselves on the outs with the facts, then it is our intuitions
that must stand to be schooled.
Perhaps what underlies the conviction that it is reasonable
at this stage to entertain estimates on the number of centers of
consciousness in a normal human is the idea that whatever
else neuroscience might tell us about conscious states, at least
it is obvious that there is one single type of state or process
involved, and so once we know the behavioral manifestations
of consciousness, we can at least argue reasonably about
whether there exist one or two or five hundred centers. Yet
what is obvious in the nascent stages of theory may well be
quaintly preposterous from the hindsight of developed theo-
ry, and it is surely possible that this conception of conscious-
ness as one single type of phenomenon will be found to be so.
The brain may well be fitted out with a synod of self-
monitoring mechanisms that operate variously and at varying
degrees of efficiency at different times, with none function-
ing as the "center of consciousness." And all this, unbe-
knownst to introspection. Different mechanisms may ascend
to physiological prominence under different circumstances -
e.g., when the organism is vigilant in foiling a predator, as
contrasted to resting contentedly after a meal, or when it is
fatigued or sexually aroused, or when its attention is divided
between reading a bedtime story and fantasizing its fortune,
or when it is dreaming or in deep sleep, or hysterical, high, or
hypnotized (Hilgard 1977). Distinct neuronal structures may
figure in distinct types of awareness, and, indeed, some such
structures may be in the left hemisphere and some in the
right. Information may be differentially available to different
processes, and control may be distributed and shifting rather
than the unique and abiding province of one particular
mechanism. Even if two mechanisms are operating in the
right and left hemispheres, the idea that one's "inner life"
would thus be a tandem affair is no more plausible than
inferring that the retina cannot have a blind spot because if it
did our visual field would contain a black hole in the center.
The reason we do not perceive a black hole in our visual field
is that the brain has no means for detecting the edges of such
a hole, and neighboring areas "fill in the gaps." If, as seems
likely, there are a variety of attentional processes, their
ascending and receding may go unmarked by introspection
because the brain has no means for detecting the onset and
offset of such processes.
What all this suggests to me is not so much that "persons"
or "centers of consciousness" turn out to be more numerous
than we thought. Rather, it suggests that the notions of
"person" and "center of consciousness" do not have the
objective empirical integrity we thought they did.
NOTE
1. The official count was 6,500. See Andrew Dickson White
1896, vol. 2, p. 143.
Cognitive processing is not equivalent to
conscious processing
Richard J. Davidson
Laboratory of Cognitive Psychobiology, State University of New York at
Purchase, Purchase, N. Y. 10577
Although the study of consciousness has lain and continues to
lie at the core of much research in the biobehavioral sciences,
it is only recently that investigators have attempted to formu-
104 THE BEHAVIORAL AND BRAIN SCIENCES (1981), 4
late questions about this phenomenon in more precise terms
that lend themselves to empirical testing (e.g., Davidson &
Davidson 1980). One of the most prevalent confusions of
workers in this area is equating complex cognitive processing
with conscious processing. Higher mental operations are often
considered to be synonomous with conscious activity (e.g.,
Battista 1978).
A number of authors have argued on the basis of both
empirical and logical considerations that many, if not most,
cognitive operations proceed in the absence of conscious
awareness (e.g., Davidson 1980; Piaget 1973; Nisbett &
Wilson 1977). For example, the processes by which we decide
whether a sentence is grammatical are typically inaccessible
to conscious awareness. Similarly, the operations required for
determining whether a face to which we are exposed is
familiar are also typically unavailable for conscious report.
These and other similar examples lead to the suggestion that
the occurrence of complex cognitive processing is insufficient
evidence from which to infer the presence of consciousness.
One of the central assumptions upon which Puccetti's thesis
is based is that complex mental activity is associated with or
implies conscious processing. On numerous occasions, claims
about mental duality are quickly translated into arguments
for conscious duality. For example, Puccetti suggests that
"mental duality [can] be surgically induced, so that the
potential for double consciousness already existfs] in the
normal - if epileptic - human brain" (italics added).
The representation of information in one hemisphere that
duplicates the information contained in the other is taken as
evidence to support "conscious duality." The obvious adap-
tive advantage of the bilateral representation of sensory
information is not necessarily of direct relevance to the claim
of dual conscious processors. Information can be represented
and utilized in the absence of conscious awareness. For
example, one is rarely conscious of the contextual information
(sometimes referred to as "scripts") that enables us to under-
stand communications with incomplete elaboration. These
considerations suggest that arguments about the duplication
of sensory information in the hemispheres are not of direct
relevance to the assertion of dual streams of consciousness
within each hemisphere.
Given his thesis of conscious duality, Puccetti must account
for the absence of conscious recognition of dual streams of
consciousness. He reasons by analogy and offers a hypotheti-
cal example of a person unable to distinguish between a real
and a televised football half field. This argument, however,
does not bear directly upon whether the activities and
processes occurring within each hemisphere are themselves
conscious. A claim of conscious duality must rest upon
evidence demonstrating separate spheres of consciousness
within each hemisphere. Puccetti does not make explicit the
criteria by which he infers the presence of consciousness
within the separated hemispheres of a commissurotomy
patient.
The lack of awareness of the two separate streams of
consciousness in the real-versus-televised-football-half-field
analogy rests upon the assumption that the delay between the
real-time events and the televised replay will be sufficiently
short as to escape notice. While this state of affairs may be
characteristic of televised replay, it is unclear whether the
same assumption should be made about the human brain.
First, the likelihood that the information-processing opera-
tions within each hemisphere will be in perfect synchrony
with one another is probably small. Functional differences
between the hemispheres apparently influence the speed with
which each processes and responds to different classes of
information (see, for example, Dimond & Beaumont 1974).
Furthermore, the hemispheres have recently been found to
differ in their ratio of gray to white matter (Gur, Packer,
Hungerbuhler, Reivich, Obrist, Amarnek & Sackeim 1980).

This structural difference is likely to result in differences in
processing rate between the hemispheres which might inter-
act with the type of stimulus to be processed.
Structural and functional hemispheric differences are not
the only sources of variance likely to result in asynchrony
between the hemispheres. The delay resulting from the
interhemispheric transfer itself may be sufficiently long to be
detectable if processing activities within both hemispheres
achieved conscious status. Estimates of interhemispheric
transfer time using electrophysiological procedures fall
within the range of detectable time differences (see, for
example, Salamy 1978). Thus the analogy to the transmission
of a televised image may be particularly inappropriate with
respect to temporal parameters since neural conduction time
is considerably slower than electrical conduction time.
As Puccetti recognizes from the claims he is making about
conscious duality, one would logically deduce that our
perceptions ought to appear doubled. In order to avoid this
clearly inappropriate suggestion, Puccetti invokes a process of
confinement whereby the conscious information in one hemi-
sphere is inaccessible to the conscious processing mechanism
in the other. The nature of this information-gating mecha-
nism is never clearly specified. It is unclear how the brain
makes a decision to transfer only nonconscious information
between the hemispheres and block the transmission of infor-
mation that is conscious within each hemisphere.
The corpus of literature to which Puccetti refers does
indeed suggest that considerable duplication of sensory infor-
mation in the two hemispheres occurs, and probably has
important survival value. However, the leap from this
evidence to the assertion of conscious duality rests largely on
the assumption that higher cognitive processing is conscious,
and this latter assumption is inconsistent with contemporary
literature on this topic.
Mental dualism and commissurotomy
John C. Eccles
Max-Planck-lnslilul fur biophysikalische, Chemie, D-3400 Gottingen-Niko-
lausberg. W. Germany
A general criticism of this paper is that there is confusion in
linguistic usage. Without any qualification, material struc-
tures the cerebral hemispheres, are given mental attributes in
a manner that seems to be begging the question. With this
initial assumption the case for mental duality would follow
convincingly from there being two cerebral hemispheres. For
example, Puccetti writes in the third paragraph of the section
on the human split-brain: "Thus for purposes of attributing
mental events to split-brain subjects we are forced to use the
'homuncular' language of referring to a 'left hemisphere'
stream of consciousness and a 'right hemisphere' stream in the
same subject. Others may take umbrage at this, but what is
the alternative?" And in the second paragraph of the section
on evolutionary considerations: "But surely what each hemi-
sphere sees is real enough. If there is any illusion here, it is
only the illusion each hemisphere has that it alone perceives
and acts on those perceptions." And in the fifth paragraph of
this section: ". . . neither half brain has introspective access to
the conscious contents of the other."
In the penultimate paragraph of the section on mute
hemispheric cooperativeness I am credited with the view
(Popper & Eccles 1977) "that the mute cerebral hemisphere
of the split-brain patient simply doesn't have any mental
states but is a kind of automaton." This is a serious misquota-
tion. On p. 329 I wrote: "The assertion is made that the
intelligent performance of the minor hemisphere establishes
that the activities of the minor hemisphere are associated with
a consciousness that is equivalent to that of the dominant
Commentary/Puccetti: Mental duality
hemisphere, merely differing because of linguistic disabili-
ty. . . . The erroneous interpretations of Puccetti (1973), Zang-
will (1973), Doty (1975), and Savage (1975) occur because
they fail to distinguish between the self-consciousness asso-
ciated with the dominant hemisphere, as reported by the
conscious subject, and the consciousness that is assumed to be
associated with the minor hemisphere because of its skilled
responses that display insight and intelligence." My point was
that with the commissurotomy patient the minor hemisphere
gives no conscious experience to the subject. I conclude on
page 329: "Commissurotomy has split the bihemispheric
brain into a dominant hemisphere that is exclusively in liaison
with the self-conscious mind and controlled by it and a minor
hemisphere that carries out many of the performances
previously carried out by the intact brain, but it is not under
control by the self-conscious mind. It may be in liaison with a
mind, but this is quite different from the self-conscious mind
of the dominant hemisphere - so different that a grave risk of
confusion results from the common use of the words 'mind'
and 'consciousness' for both entities. "
Fig. E 7-5 in Popper & Eccles (1977, p. 375) illustrates, in
the normal subject, the possibility of a direct path from the
minor hemisphere to the self-conscious mind.
In view of the recent work of Sperry, Zaidel, and Zaidel
(1979) I have admitted in a book published since Puccetti's
article (Eccles 1980, lecture 1) that after commissurotomy the
minor hemisphere has "a limited self-consciousness," finally
concluding on page 13: "These tests for the existence of mind
and of self-conscious mind are at a relatively simple pictorial
and emotional level. We can still doubt if the right hemi-
sphere has a full self-conscious existence. For example, does it
plan and worry about the future, does it make decisions and
judgements based on some value system? These are essential
qualifications for personhood as ordinarily understood
(Strawson 1959; Popper & Eccles 1977, sections 31 and 33)."
And on page 14: "Thus the commissurotomy has split a
fragment off from the self-conscious mind, but the person
remains apparently unscathed with mental unity intact in its
now exclusive left hemisphere association."
I have given these extensive quotations with their overtones
of dualist-interactionism as a background in my attempt to
discover what is the mental duality that is the central theme
of Puccetti's disputation. In fact, I raise the question: What
more does Puccetti require for his mental duality? Clearly
there is mental duality in the commissurotomized patient,
though it is far from being a symmetrical duality. If we could
reestablish the corpus callosum, this duality would surely be
merged by the tremendous impulse traffic between the two
hemispheres. That is the case with the normal brain, though
Puccetti seems to have difficulties with this conventional
view, expressing at the end the strange belief "that the
function of the corpus callosum is to duplicate conscious
experience on both sides of the brain. . . . " He apparently
derives this belief from a comparison of commissurotomized
with chiasmal patients. I find no difficulty in accommodating
thefindingson these patients given in the section on bitempo-
ral defects with the conventional view of the corpus callosum.
There must be a serious misunderstanding somewhere.
In the second paragraph of the target article the claim is
made that "some facts that it [mental dualism] predicts can be
documented in the literature and in clinical practice, but
have gone unnoticed until now just because the hypothesis
was not seriously considered by workers in the field."
I do not think that this claim is supported by the text of
Puccetti, where only one such "fact" is documented in the
section on bitemporal defects, and that is, I think, fully
explained by the conventional view of the function of the
corpus callosum. A concluding remark is that Puccetti seems
to have given up the strange notion that there are two persons
in the one skull!
THE BEHAVIORAL AND BRAIN SCIENCES (1981), 4 105
Commentary/Puccetti: Mental duality
The perverseness of the right hemisphere
Norman Geschwind
Harvard Neurological Unit, Beth Israel Hospital, Boston, Mass. 02215
It is appropriate first to review some of the factual back-
ground material of the target article. Puccetti states that it
was Wigan in 1844 who first proposed that we have two
minds, and that the second advocate of this hypothesis was
Bogen in 1969. But I expressed similar ideas (Geschwind
1965), and I suspect that many previous authors had done the
same. In particular, I stressed "the usefulness of sometimes
considering animals or humans not as a unit, but as a union of
loosely joined wholes" and also that "probably even in the
normal person parts of the brain are so weakly connected as to
make their interaction difficult." In fact, some connections
normally present in adults might take years to develop in
children. Puccetti seems to be equally unaware that what he
calls "mutual functional dissociation of the disconnected
hemispheres" was described in detail long before the 1960s.
Dejerine (1892) described a lesion in the splenium of a case of
pure alexia without agraphia, a localization confirmed
repeatedly since that time.
Hugo Lipemann (1900) described a patient whom he
interpreted as having a disconnection of the hemispheres as
the result of a lesion of the corpus callosum, which was fully
confirmed by postmortem in 1906. Kurt Goldstein (1908)
described a similar case, as did many other German authors.
Indeed, the callosal syndromes were a standard part of
German neurology in the years between the wars.
Puccetti points to an extremely important phenomenon
when he reminds the reader that patients with right-
hemisphere lesions often show marked neglect of the left side
of the space and the body, while callosal patients do not.
Although I fully agree with Puccetti's assertion that there is
duality - and even multiplicity - of consciousness, I believe,
however, that the full implications of the syndrome of left
inattention point to a very important difference between the
consciousnesses of the two hemispheres. Consider again the
very simple fact that left inattention is far more common and
severe than right inattention. One might wish to advance the
simple theory that the right parietal lesion cuts off informa-
tion from the left side of space in the body and therefore leads
to inattention to that side. We must immediately ask,
however, why it is that the callosal lesion does not have this
effect. It seems at first as if the answer would simply be that
now each hemisphere is receiving information from its own
half of space to which it attends. Unfortunately, this simple
explanation cannot work. It is necessary for us to inquire why
it is that the patient with as extensive a left parietal lesion
usually fails to neglect the right side of space and of the body,
a result that would be expected if indeed each hemisphere
were capable of paying attention only to its own half of space
and of the body. Thus, the patient with the left parietal lesion
asked to bisect a large number of lines on a page bisects those
on both left and right sides, while the patient with the right
parietal lesion tends to bisect only those on the right side. The
patient with the left parietal lesion does not fail to shave the
right half of the face or to dress only the left half of the body,
while the patient with the right parietal lesion may indeed
show failure to shave the left half of the face, and may put his
bathrobe only on the right side of the body.
It is my view that this phenomenon is dependent on the
following mechanism. The left half of the brain does indeed
pay attention only to its own half of space. Therefore, the
patient with the right-hemisphere lesion shows normal atten-
tion only to the right side. On the other hand, the right half of
the brain must be monitoring the availability of information
to both halves of the space and of the body. Thus, when the
patient with a left-hemisphere lesion is asked to bisect lines,
106 THE BEHAVIORAL AND BRAIN SCIENCES (1981), 4
the right hemisphere becomes aware that the corpus callosum
is not relaying to it information from the left brain, and
therefore scans the environment so as to bring stimuli into the
left visual field, thus ensuring that there is no neglect. This
does not negate Puccetti's excellent supposition that the
normal duality of the hemispheres avoids duplication of
high-level sensory information, but does ensure that the right
hemisphere is at least aware that the information is being
received by the opposite hemisphere, even if it presumably is
not fully aware of its exact content. This therefore raises the
suggestion, surprising to many people, and indeed the exact
opposite of what has been suggested by many others, that the
right hemisphere has, in many senses, a superior conscious-
ness. Furthermore, it explains how, despite the lateral separa-
tion of primary sensory information, a unity of a kind can still
be maintained in behavior, even with complete hemispheric
disconnection. I would also point out that this superiority of
the right hemisphere is perhaps even more striking in the
normal. As Mesulam, Waxman, Geschwind, & Sabin (1976)
have shown, right-hemisphere lesions in the acute stage often
produce a dramatic global inattention syndrome, which later
on often turns into left inattention. This suggests that the left
hemisphere in the normal state is even less responsible for the
monitoring of the environment and often comes to monitor its
half of space only after destruction of the right half of the
brain. The reason for this can be readily seen by what I would
expect to be a natural extension of Puccetti's theory: that
while independent primary sensory information can go to
each hemisphere, it would be extremely difficult to have
independent motoric output. If Puccetti's theory ingeniously
shows us how primary sensory reduplication and confusion
can be avoided, it must equally well provide a system
organized in some different way for the control of the motoric
output so as to avoid contradictory actions. As we shall see,
however, although such a control continues to persist to a
great extent in the callosal patient, it does indeed frequently
fail.
Let me also point out that, while I find Puccetti's theory
most attractive in explaining the avoidance of conflict of
primary sensory input along the major afferent routes, one
must take into consideration the well-established fact that
sensation is not represented purely contralaterally. There are
indeed many ipsilateral sensory pathways. Thus, even after
total destruction of a hemisphere, there is almost no change in
the audiograms of the two ears, since there is a highly
effective ipsilateral pathway. Similarly, as was shown first by
Walter Dandy (1928) and more recently by Burklund and
Smith (1977) patients with total hemispherectomies for
lesions acquired in adult life have somesthetic sensation over
most of the side of the body opposite the hemispherectomy.
It would appear at first sight that this existence of ipsi-
lateral pathways might represent a contradiction to Puccetti's
view that the individual is so designed that each hemisphere
receives unduplicated primary sensation. I believe, however,
that this is not the case. Thus, as Sparks and Geschwind (1968)
showed in the first study of dichotic listening in a patient who
had undergone a commissurotomy, when a word was
presented to either the right or the left ear alone, the patient
could report it. Since the report was coming from the left
hemisphere, the only way for auditory information from the
left ear to reach that side would have to be via the ipsilateral
pathway, which functioned as well as the contralateral path-
way from the right ear to the left speech regions. However,
when this patient was presented with words dichotically -
i.e., simultaneously to the two ears - he could only report
those from the right ear. In other words, when the ipsilateral
pathway is not in conflict with the contralateral pathway,
there is no possibility of confusion and the input is not
suppressed. On the other hand, when both the ipsilateral and
the contralateral pathways deliver a message to the same

hemisphere, the ipsilateral pathway is suppressed and thus
avoids the duplication of which Puccetti spoke. In the normal,
of course, the patient does report words presented simulta-
neously to the two ears, but typically reports those from the
left ear later. It is clear that the left-ear words must reach the
left hemisphere via the corpus callosum, rather than by the
ipsilateral pathway. The delay imposed by the extra synapse
involved in callosal transmission would thus appear to provide
enough separation between the two stimuli so that confusion
is avoided. This is consonant with Efron's (1963) demonstra-
tions that simultaneous stimuli to the two sides of the body
reach the speech regions at different times because of the
callosal delay.
In the seventh paragraph of the section "Mute hemispheric
cooperativeness in man: an enigma resolved," Puccetti states
that the minor hemisphere has adequate language compre-
hension for handling outspoken denials of its receipt of
stimulation by the speaking hemisphere. I believe that
Puccetti has made this statement much too lightly. It should
be recalled that the surgical callosal patients, with only one
exception, to my knowledge, have had early brain lesions and
long-standing epilepsy. It is well known that with early lesions
the right hemisphere's language capacities are far superior to
those of normals. It is, after all, common knowledge that
many adult aphasic patients with lesions confined to the left
hemisphere may never regain anything but the most rudi-
mentary language comprehension regardless of the method of
testing. Some of the surgical callosal patients do indeed show
a high measure of comprehension by the right hemisphere,
but even in these cases the language systems of the right
hemisphere are usually quite poor compared to those of the
left, and far poorer than those of patients who have early
destruction of the speech areas. Puccetti goes on to say that
the right hemisphere, after years of faithfully cuing the
speaking hemisphere, shows no behavioral manifestation of
resentment. This, however, is far too strong a statement.
Puccetti himself speaks, in the fifth paragraph of "Mute
hemispheric cooperativeness in man, ' of "an uncooperative
or rebellious left hand that does such things as slapping them
awake when oversleeping in the morning." The first descrip-
tion of an unruly right hemisphere is that of Kurt Goldstein's
case of 1908 who, when first seen, showed the remarkable
phenomenon that the patient's left hand attempted to choke
the patient herself, and this hand had to be pulled away.
Furthermore, the left hand did other unpleasant acts, such as
tearing the bedclothes off the bed.
The same phenomenon was, furthermore, observed by
Akeleitis (1945) and was called by him diagonstic dyspraxia.
Thus, one of his callosal patients might with his left hand shut
a drawer forcefully upon a right hand that was reaching into
it to remove a pair of socks. A surgical callosal patient whom I
had the opportunity to examine extensively over a month
pointed out that since his operation he would sometimes
suddenly strike his wife, but only with his left hand, which
caused him extreme chagrin, since he was normally a mild-
mannered man with no tendencies for such activity. Further-
more, the French neurologists Brion and Jedynak (1972)
pointed out in a recent monograph that this type of phenome-
non was common in the callosal patients they had examined
and they gave to it the name "la main etrangere " - i.e., the
alien hand. Furthermore, it is not uncommon to see a callosal
patient, attempting to do a task such as Kohs blocks with the
right hand, being subjected to constant interference by the
left hand, which has to be put out of the way.
Finally, Puccetti goes on to insist that there is a clear
display of intrahemispheric as opposed to interhemispheric
unity. Let me point out that I would disagree with this
interpretation and that intrahemispheric disunity also exists.
In the first place, I believe that this disunity is reflected in
many statements made by normals, such as "I couldn't help
Commentary/Puccetti: Mental duality
doing it" or "I did it against my own best intentions" or "I
have done my best to stop myself from being angry" or "I
couldn't keep from laughing." There are probably at least
two reasons for this disunity. In the first place, conduction in
the nervous system is slow and many portions of the nervous
system are far from each other, even within the same hemi-
sphere, so that there is independence of action. This is
particularly true for emotional stimuli. The second reason is
that, in fact, there are clearly some normal failures of
connection. Some of the simplest examples, which I cite
frequently, are those of smiling, laughing, and crying. A
group of normals faced by a photographer almost always
smile very badly in response to the command to do so, since
they are attempting to use the cortex, which has, in fact, not
learned to smile. When the photographer tells a joke there is
now a stimulus going along a different pathway via the limbic
system and stimulating a body of gray matter located subcor-
tically that contains the built-in actions of emotional expres-
sion. A few normals can simulate normal smiling on
command, but most normals, and indeed often even highly
skilled actors, cannot laugh on command. Finally, although
every one of us has cried thousands of times, we cannot, in
fact, cry on verbal command, but only in response to a limbic
stimulus reaching these subcortical centers. There are many
types of evidence from brain lesions showing the existence of
such separate subcortical centers, which one can learn to
inhibit, but not to excite. It might be argued that with
adequate intensive training one might, in fact, learn to cry on
command, but this only illustrates that the normal state in this
circumstance is one of multiplicity which can be overcome
only by long and arduous practice, and often not even then.
May we forget our minds for the moment?
Michael B. Green
Department of Philosophy, University of Texas, Austin, Tex. 78712
St. Augustine had a theory of soul that made him suffer from
worms. He held that (1) there is no life without soul, and (2)
soul is indivisible. He could bear the thrashing of severed
lizard tails because this violent movement was merely
elements of air and fire escaping. But when "a many-footed
creeping . . . worm [was] cut... in half, both parts of the body
then moved in opposite directions away from the cut with as
much speed and energy as if they had been two living
animals. . . . One of them, touched by the stylus, would turn
itself toward the place of the pain, while the other, feeling
nothing, moved freely on its way. And, more surprising yet,
when we tried to find how far this could go, and we cut the
worm, or worms, in many sections, these would also move, so
that if we had not cut them at all and if the fresh wounds
were not visible, we would have believed that each section
had been separately born and was living its own life. " To the
credit of the intellect, Augustine admitted, "If I had not been
well versed in questions about the nature of a body - I should
be inclined to bestow the palm of victory on the proponents of
the doctrine that the soul is a body." Instead, lest our
immortal souls be endangered, he counseled faith in religious
reasoning about the soul "which we acknowledge to be
indubitably correct. " He concluded that "there is no reason
for our childish fear of this little worm . . . [and suggested
that] Since, . . . from the many arguments set forth earlier . . .
it was made clear to you that the soul is not contained in place
and for that reason lacks quantity which we notice in bodies,
why do you not take it for granted that there is some cause
why a certain animal, when cut up, continues to live in each
segment and that the cause is not that the soul can be divided
with the body? If it is beyond our power to discover that
THE BEHAVIORAL AND BRAIN SCIENCES (1981). 4 107
Commentary/Puccetti: Mental duality
cause, is it not better to continue our search for the true cause,
rather than accept one that is false?" (in Dimond 1974, pp.
31-33).
Contemporary theorists fear not for their souls, but for
their minds. They have a theory of mind that makes them
suffer from split brains. They hold that (1) there is no thought
(intelligent behavior) without mind; (2) mind is indivisible;
and (3) minds have direct access to the contents of their
immediate experience.
For Puccetti, the data are clear and compelling. The left
brain and right brain are each capable of engaging in
thought, having its own visual experiences, and guiding
intelligent behavior. They do this under normal circum-
stances with identical information, and so look like one mind;
after commissurotomy, they do this with different informa-
tion, and so reveal that they were two minds all along
(because one mind cannot become two); Q.E.D. Marks (1980)
is more moderate in his conclusions, more innovative in
elaborating the mind theory. Perhaps, contrary to received
theory, minds are divisible (pp. 11, 39-40). Or perhaps minds
can temporarily have a "disunified consciousness" (p. 12).
[Might Augustine have been helped over the datum of the
stylus affecting only one worm part by the thought that the
worm soul had acquired a "disunified sentience"?] Besides,
since "minds are the things which have mental states; and
mental states are the states required by an adequate psycho-
logical theory of the organism . . . [perhaps] an adequate
psychology will construe the dual neural representations
caused by independent duplication in split-brain patients as
single psychological states" (pp. 23-24; cf. 34-35). Dualistic
Puccetti counts minds from the inside by their contents (and
ingenuously infers distinct mental contents from redundant
information); pragmatic Marks counts minds from the
outside, relying on theoretical convenience and economy (p.
23). They differ on but a single fact: whether the severed
hemispheres intentionally communicate with each other.
Puccetti thinks they do (p. 16); Marks denies it (p. 25).
How much interest we take in this debate depends on
whether we are as committed to our lay theory of minds as
Augustine was to his religious doctrine of souls. I publicly
confess to not knowing whether minds can have more than
one stream of consciousness, whether they can temporarily
tolerate a disunified consciousness, whether they are what-
ever entities "explain our propositional attitudes" (Marks
1980, p. 34) rather than "centers of consciousness" (Puccetti,
p. 10), or whether a single person can have two of them. And,
provided that philosophical colleagues can forgo displaying
their synthetic powers of imagination (sic!) by arguing that
split-brain patients should have extra votes, or by filling
Philosophy h Public Affairs with pieces bearing such titles as
"Does paternalism justify left-hemispheric domination?", I
would not care.
There are two morals to be drawn. The first is that we
cannot automatically expect progress in neuroscience to be
relevant to our lay theoretical commitments to such terms as
mind, experience, stream of consciousness, mental content,
or person. Many such admittedly vague and troublesome
terms simply will not survive with the advance of neuro-
science, nor shall we mourn their passing (cf., But how many
souls are there after the worm is bisected?). Questions of a
much more interesting nature may be framed and answered
when we are not constrained to make use of our lay mentalis-
tic vocabulary. The second moral is that even those parts of
lay mental theory that will perdure will probably not stand in
the quasianalytic relationships that lay mental theory dictates
for them. For example, long before it became respectable to
consider the importance of neuroscience for philosophy of
mind, Paul Meehl (1966) challenged the received meta-
predicates of raw-feel (phenomenal quality) statements by
working out some neurophysiclogical models showing how
108 THE BEHAVIORAL AND BRAIN SCIENCES (1981), 4
one mind could be aware of another mind's experience (raw
feel) and how a given mind could fail to be aware of its own
experience. These models showed how, under certain circum-
stances, "I feel your pain" and "I'm in severe pain but can't
feel it" would be true. As Meehl put it:
The most fascinating feature of these fantastic thought-experi-
ments and the feature having most philosophic relevance, is that
they force us to re-examine the analyticity of epistemic-pragmatic
statements about "I," by bringing out our implicit assumptions
concerning the nature and identity of persons. Unless a person is a
"simple"-an entity without "parts," "regions," "components,"
"subsystems" . . . the statement about persons' raw-feel sets being
disjoint hinges upon the supposition that two bodies' cortical states
must necessarily be disjoint. This in turn depends upon the alleged
impossibility of two brains sharing parts of cortices - namely the
"parts" whose states are the immediate causal ancestors of raw-feel
events. I cannot see any clear reason why such a state of affairs is
impossible, (p. 139)
Although the models are vulnerable to certain difficulties
(Green 1979), they should have served notice to the philo-
sophical community to treat traditional convictions about
mentalistic terms (persons/minds/experiences) a good deal
more tentatively than was common - unless, of course, the
findings of neuroscience were to be summarily treated as
irrelevant to our enshrined theory of mind.
Puccetti and Marks both acknowledge the importance of
neuroscience, but are concerned only with the second moral.
They want to retain the familiar entities of our lay theory of
mind and argue about what the findings of neuroscience
portend for them. Of course there are problems. They don't
quite know how to use the data to count minds, or even
experiences (cf. Puccetti, pp. 8-10, 12-14; Marks, p. 24), but
they both assume that the questions involving such traditional
terms of lay mental theory are the most fruitful, whereas I
think that the first moral is at least as important and that its
confounding presence undermines the importance of worry-
ing too much at present about whether some of our traditional
views about minds will survive unscathed, and which these
will be. The point is as much methodological as ontological,
for despite these cautions I am an unrepentant friend of raw
feels (qualia/experiences), however unable to weave them
into the present body of neuroscientific data (Green 1979,
section 5, esp. note 6). But a moratorium on forcing new data
into old philosophical molds is appropriate for more than one
reason. First, we do not know how to do it. Second, the
literature on commissurotomy and other brain lesions can be
described in relatively uncontentious, nonparadoxical lan-
guage that does justice to the conceptual issues regnant within
the facts. Third, and most important, if philosophy can only
use the data of neuroscience to address age-old questions
whose relationship to this data is slippery at best, instead of
forging challenging new questions that are tractable within
the framework of these developing data, the chance to alter
its moribund course with some of the fresher lifeblood avail-
able from neuroscience may come to naught because the
patient is too blinkered or too brittle to grasp the opportu-
nity.
Are two heads better than one?
Robert J. Joynt
Department of Neurology, University of Rochester, Rochester, N.Y. 14642
Consciousness is like the Trinity: if it is explained so that you
understand it, it hasn't been explained correctly. Now, with
split-brain man Puccetti deals with a double dilemma - not
only "What is consciousness?" but "Are there two of them?"
The author advances the theory that, not only is consciousness

dual, but it is necessary that each of the hemispheres have
separate states of consciousness and that it not span both.
As a clinical neurologist I have been trained not to deal
with the concept of consciousness. I can deal with responsive-
ness, for that I can test with a stimulus, grading the response
or noting the nonresponse. What is going on in that patient's
brain between the stimulus and the response is his own
province. Presumably, what is going on is consciousness or
awareness of the stimulus and response - but it is still the
private domain of that individual. Therefore, I will deal with
responsiveness and hope that "consciousness" fades into a
well-deserved obscurity.
Now that there has been sufficient obfuscation of the term
I can pass to the question of the separate responsiveness of the
two hemispheres. The thesis presented by Puccetti seems
astonishing in that he even proposes the question. What is so
apocalyptic in suggesting that two separate parts of the
nervous system, either connected or disconnected, process
information and effect a response? Why shouldn't both hemi-
spheres be responsive (or "conscious" - his term)? We are not
amazed when an isolated spinal cord is responsive to certain
stimuli. The only difference is that a cerebral hemisphere
responds in a more complicated fashion and we are more or
less aware of the process.
The problem arises when only one of the hemispheres can
talk about it. This is the trap that caught Eccles, and it is
exemplified in his statement "We can summarize this by
stating that the goings-on in the minor hemisphere, which we
may refer to as the computer, never come into the conscious
experience of the subject" (Eccles 1970). Puccetti correctly
points out the fallacy in this reasoning but then makes a
similar but less niggardly error by suggesting that we have
dual consciousness (separate but not equal). Why not three or
a hundred? After all, some can chew gum, and walk, and
presumably make presidential decisions (that's three) - the
point being that different parts of the nervous system are
taken up with different responses and varying degrees of
awareness of those responses, some in one hemisphere and
some in the other. Some complex responses require contribu-
tions of several areas. If some of these are disconnected by
disease or surgery then the response is faulty. If it happens
that it does not connect with certain parts of the left
hemisphere we may not talk about it, but we are aware of it.
The deaf-mute can solve complex problems without the use of
language as we know it. Puccetti recognizes this but still
wishes to draw a fence around the individual hemispheres.
There are many fences and they are forever shifting, and the
ascendancy of these areas constantly changes so that excita-
tion, inhibition, and disinhibilion take place. So responsive-
ness and its awareness ("consciousness") are contantly shift-
ing, contracting, and expanding. Irredentism has no role in
cerebral physiology.
The brain and the split brain: A duel with
duality as a model of mind
Joseph E. LeDoux and Michael S. Gazzaniga
Division of Cognitive Neuroscience, Department of Neurology, Cornell
University Medical College. New York. N.Y. 10021
Split-brain studies in animals and humans have demonstrated
that sectioning of the forebrain commissures produces two
independent mental entities, each with thoughts, feelings,
and plans for action that exist outside the realm of awareness
of the other (Gazzaniga 1970; Gazzaniga & LeDoux 1978). In
"The case for mental duality," Puccetti proposes that this
state of affairs is not produced by the surgical separation of
the hemispheres but is instead a reflection of the normal
Commentary/Puccetti: Mental duality
organization of the vertebrate brain. In our minds, however,
mental duality as a model of normal brain organization is not
only logically strained and theoretically cumbersome, it is also
inconsistent with contemporary understanding of brain func-
tion.
The enigma of visual duplication. It is well established
through anatomical, physiological, and behavioral experi-
ments that both visual fields are represented in each hemi-
sphere of vertebrates. Although only the contralateral visual
field reaches a hemisphere directly (via thalamic relay), the
ipsilateral field is also represented (by way of relay from the
opposite hemisphere). How is it, then, that we are consciously
aware of one sensory world if there are bihemispheric repre-
sentations of that world? Mental duality is Puccetti's answer
to this enigma.
Puccetti's hypothesis is that the "double representation of
the sensory field in the two hemispheres amounts to double
consciousness." In building his case, Puccetti is required to
challenge the competing hypothesis concerning the enigma of
duplication: the unity of conscious awareness of the sensory
world is maintained by the interhemispheric integration
(fusion) of the bihemispheric representations into unitary
percepts (Gazzaniga & LeDoux 1978). The case for mental
duality thus rests on its own merits, as well as on the case
against fusion.
There Is no bitemporal defect In spllt-braln patients. The
empirical evidence that Puccetti musters for duality centers
on what he has referred to as "two kinds of bitemporal
defect," by which he means, presumably, defects in the
perception of images in the temporal quadrants of the visual
field. While such a defect is present in chiasm-lesioned
subjects, it simply does not exist in split-brain patients. The
visual defect resulting from section of the forebrain commis-
sures occurs in the interhemispheric integration of the repre-
sentations of the left and right visual fields. It is thus a
hemifield defect, not a "bitemporal defect." While this faux
pas is a glaring embarrassment to the case for mutual duality,
with the admission that terminology is not necessarily crucial
to the underlying argument, the implications of observations
from split-brain and chiasm-lesioned patients can neverthe-
less be considered.
Puccetti argues that, if mental duality held, "the commis-
surotomy subject would display his defect with both eyes
open" and the chiasm-sectioned patient would not show his
"visual defect when he has both eyes open, but only when
each eye is tested separately." Puccetti is right in stating the
conditions that allow the demonstration of the visual aberra-
tions in these patients. However, these data are irrelevant as
evidence for duality or against fusion. The visual phenomena
in question are simply and obviously predictable from visual
anatomy and consistent with both the fusion and the duality
hypotheses: they raise the possibility of, rather than provide
the resolution to, the choice between duality and fusion.
Sensory processing and sensory Input. Puccetti's "teacup"
argument also fails to distinguish between the competing
hypotheses. He argues anecdotally that "consciousness does
not span both hemispheres," that duality exists, because
otherwise we normals would see teacup teacup instead of just
teacup when tea appears in the left visual field and cup in the
right visual field. This argument, however, is equally applica-
ble to the fusion hypothesis: without fusion we normals would
experience two visual worlds - the representation in the left
hemisphere and the representation in the right hemisphere.
In a related line of reasoning Puccetti also asks, since "the
arrival in area 17 (primary visual cortex) of neural messages
that are decoded as a familiar word is adequate . . . [for] each
of the cerebral hemispheres of the split-brain patient, why
should it not be adequate in the callosally intact subject as
well? " In other words, why don't we respond to right-
visual-field input separately from left-visual-field input
THE BEHAVIORAL AND BRAIN SCIENCES (1981), 4 109
Commentary/Pucce^Ki: Mental duality
rather than to the combined input from both visual fields?
There should be no mystery here. These instances are
simply accounted for by the fact that sensory processing takes
place on the basis of sensory input. If the only input available
to a hemisphere is from one visual field, the percept
constructed by that hemisphere will utilize only input from
that visual field. If, as in the normal brain, the input available
involves both thalamic and commissural input, and thus both
visual fields, then the emergent percept in conscious aware-
ness will be constructed on the basis of bihemispheric repre-
sentations of both visualfields.The Puccetti hypothesis is thus
yet another example of the all-too-common tendency, seen
most often in studies of cerebral asymmetry, to literally
interpret the normal brain as split.
Locating consciousness. Puccetti's attraction to mental
duality appears to reflect the belief that consciousness can be
localized. In his introduction, he notes that "it would be
absurd to impute mental functions to the organism as a whole,
or even to the whole brain, since destruction of the cerebral
cortex is enough by itself to render a human permanently
nonsentient and noncognitive. ' Puccetti's implication seems
to be that mental function (by which he presumably means
not any or all mental functions but one specific function -
conscious awareness of sensory input) is carried out at the
cortical level. Regardless of whether he is right, this particular
argument of his is not, since small lesions of the brain stem
can also permanently render a human noncognitive (Plum &
Posner 1966).
Puccetti, of course, does not simply leave consciousness at
the cortical level. He splits and doubles consciousness in
normal persons and in split-brain patients, a decision which
he appears to see as necessary unless the fusionist can "tell us
where to look for the neural mechanism that accomplishes
this fusion. '
The search for the mechanism of fusion is precisely what
the field of visual physiology is all about. Perception is the
physiological integration (fusion) of sensory inputs into
unified percepts. Within each hemisphere, the visual world is
multiply represented, and the unified percepts of a single
isolated hemisphere thus reflect the integration of processing
occurring in many cortical and subcortical cell groups. Simi-
larly, in the intact brain, unified percepts involving both
visual fields reflect the fusion of visual processing in the
multiple areas representing the visual world within each
hemisphere, with the processing occurring in the homologous
areas of the other hemisphere. The search for the neural
mechanisms that accomplish fusion is thus well under way.
Where we ought to look for the neural substrate of
consciousness is quite a different question. We are not likely
to find a center of consciousness. The neural mechanisms
underlying conscious experience, if they are ever uncovered,
will surely be revealed as complex systems of interconnected
neurons.
Self-awareness. While it is not possible at present to
pinpoint in any detail the anatomy of consciousness, it is
possible to specify some of the functional properties of
conscious awareness. And it is precisely in this area that recent
studies of split-brain patients have been most illuminating
(LeDoux, Wilson, & Gazzaniga 1977; Gazzaniga, LeDoux, &
Wilson 1978; Gazzaniga & LeDoux 1978). The observations
of interest concern how the left hemisphere interprets behav-
iors produced by the right hemisphere in test situations.
Though it is in the dark as to why such acts were produced,
the left hemisphere readily interprets the act, and not as
anomalous, but as natural.
Puccetti has argued that this is evidence for duality in the
normal brain. We think Puccetti again misses the point. The
interpretation of right-hemisphere activities by the left hemi-
sphere in the split-brain studies is not carried out by the left
hemisphere as a whole unit, but by those subsets of neural
110 THE BEHAVIORAL AND BRAIN SCIENCES (1981), 4
systems which make linguistic analysis possible. It is the
verbal system, not the left hemisphere per se, which is
compelled to interpret behaviors that are produced by the
isolated right hemisphere in test situations and by the neural
systems of either hemisphere in daily life.
In this view, the mind is a composite of mental systems,
each capable of perceiving, remembering, emoting, and
responding to the world. Some facets of mental processing,
most notably those facets which are processed verbally, reach
conscious awareness. While nonverbal processing, such as
processing of the sensory world or of one's emotional state,
can and obviously does reach awareness, its primacy in
awareness quickly leads to verbal analysis. Through a
constant monitoring of external behavior and internal states, a
sense of self and a set of beliefs about the relation of self to
world are constructed and maintained. It is in this sense that
split-brain studies truly address the questions of mind.
Conclusion. Puccetti concludes his paper with the state-
ment "The case for mental duality rests." We feel that his
argument is based on a misunderstanding of some basic facts
concerning the neural mechanisms of visual perception and a
misinterpretation of observations of split-brain patients.
Mental duality is both implausible and unnecessary. If the
case rests, let it rest in peace.
Mental ascriptions and mental unity: Molar
subjects, brains, and homunculi
Joseph Margolis
Department of Philosophy, Temple University, Philadelphia, Penna. 19122
The correct interpretation of split-brain phenomena with
regard to dual or multiple minds, dual or multiple persons,
unified or compartmentalized centers of consciousness or
agency, or even unconscious information processing is hardly
self-evident. Puccetti, who has pursued the matter in a series
of vigorous articles over a decade, believes that "mental
duality ' obtains in both the commissurotomized and the
normal subject and that that is the correct interpretation of
the experimental evidence. Unfortunately, Puccetti never
offers an adequate theory of the intended references of the
personal pronouns used in reporting what is going on, or of
the literal import of such psychologically qualified verbs as
see, point, infer, speak, say, have (in the sense of psychologi-
cally possessing), notice, be introspectively aware of, read,
and the like. He construes the experimental and clinical
material in accord with the duality thesis - in particular, with
the thesis that "the function of the corpus callosum is to
duplicate conscious experience on both sides of the brain" -
and would have us believe that this is both internally coherent
and parsimonious.
The principal weakness of Puccetti's argument is simply
that the materials he musters are not really addressed to his
conclusion but to another; that the conclusion he draws may,
in a sense, be conceded on much more elementary grounds
than he considers, having little to do with the commissurot-
omy issue itself; and that he fails to sort these two matters out
or to advise us about their relationship, which bears on the
interpretation of his data. Part of the trouble lies with the
peculiarly elastic use of the very expressions whose proper use
we are asked to decide by reference to split-brain phenom-
ena, but which Puccetti preempts by way of (otherwise
innocent) characterizations that make a contrary thesis diffi-
cult even to formulate. And part of the trouble lies with
Puccetti's having completely neglected to explain whether,
and how, such notions as "mental events," "stream of
consciousness," "input," "output," and the like are to be
differentially applied at the molar and homuncular levels.

Puccetti himself clearly favors the homuncular and (appar-
ently) believes that all the relevant phenomena may be
correctly identified with the mental functioning of one or the
other hemisphere.
The easiest way to see the difficulty with crediting Puccet-
ti s claim - in effect, the easiest way to see its fundamental
indecisiveness - is simply to examine what Puccetti says about
the tachistoscopic experiment with the word teacup and the
resolution of the "illusion of unicity" (which he opposes to
Gazzaniga and LeDoux's "illusion of unity"). Puccetti claims
that the "split-brain patient is absolutely unique" in one
respect that favors his theory, and he asserts that the "conven-
tional view of the integrative, unifying function of the corpus
callosum with regard to conscious experience" (which he
seems to view as providing an exhaustive and exclusive
alternative to his own) could not predict the quite different
phenomena associated with "the commissurally disrupted
subject" and the "chiasmally disrupted subject." By this
strategy, he rejects both Cazzaniga and LeDoux's thesis (that
a split brain produces a split mind) and Eccles's view (that the
"mute" hemisphere is an automaton and has no mental states
at all). Puccetti's reading of these three possibilities (including
his own - mental duality in the normal subject) is compli-
cated by what he means by the homuncular ascription of
consciousness. The peculiarity of Puccetti's use of homuncu-
lar lies in his intending to preserve without change or analysis
all the attributes of molar mental life at the level of the
"molar" functioning of each hemisphere; whereas, in the
usual account (now muddied, because he ranges too freely
between [informational] "input" and "output" and "con-
sciousness" ascribed to the "homuncular hemispheres" them-
selves), the homuncular is introduced, by way of a theory, in
order to identify the functional subparts of molar functioning
itself.
Once we appreciate this terminological twist, it is
extremely easy to restate Puccetti's claims in a way that
remains empirically fruitful, no less consistent with the data
Puccetti collects, and yet utterly indecisive with regard to the
conclusion he actually wishes to draw. All one must do is
substitute information (putatively processed at the homuncu-
lar level, in the usual sense, but not in Puccetti's) - or related
expressions - for conscious experience and other cognate
expressions (normally reserved for the molar level). For
example, we have only to say (making the substitution in
Puccetti's own claim) that "the function of the corpus callo-
sum is to duplicate the processing of information [not "con-
scious experience"] on both sides of the brain," and either it is
not true (or not yet true) that "the case for mental duality
rests" (easy), or it rests only in the interesting but indecisive
sense in which the case for the duality of homuncular infor-
mation processing (equivocally now, "mental events") may
be said to rest. On this reading, all of the evidence Puccetti
musters can be reconciled with the results of alternatively
disrupting the commissures or the optic chiasm without being
forced to his conclusion - or without being forced to consider
it; and what view we should favor regarding the unity or
unicity of the mind will depend on altogether different
considerations.
Reread, for example, what Puccetti says about the tachis-
toscope experiment, when the subject ["he"] "cannot read off
the whole word [teacup]. Instead he [italics added] will, if
right-handed with speech in the left hemisphere, say the
word was cup while his [italics added] left hand, under
control of the normally mute right hemisphere, will point to
the word tea in an array of words that includes cup and
teacup. I have yet to see [Puccetti says] a convincing argu-
ment showing that it is wrong to claim that this demonstrates
mental duality in the split-brain patient, and of course the
vast majority of informed observers agree. " But if our substi-
tution is allowed, then we have indeed demonstrated that
Commentary/Puccetti: Mental duality
mental duality (at the level of normal molar reference) does
not follow at all. (In fact, it is quite conceivable that the
anomalous behavior Puccetti cites may be viewed as actually
compatible with the unity of the mind.) If, however, with
Puccetti, the molar is already identified (by definition) with
the distinct hemispheres, then it would follow trivially that
mental duality obtains. But the experimental evidence will
not have forced us to that conclusion, and indeed will not
even directly bear on it.
It is certainly admitted by all discussants that the relevant
information (usually represented propositionally, or inten-
tionally, which confirms the sense in which the homuncular
designates functional subdistinctions within the functioning
molar subject or system itself) includes what, in principal, is
not accessible at the molar level. (The exact nature of the
relationship between the molar and the homuncular is much
disputed, but not particularly pertinent here.) In any case, all
that Puccetti is able to show - indeed, all that the large
literature he refers to shows - is that the processing of infor-
mation at the homuncular level appears to be different in
intact subjects, commissurotomized subjects, and subjects
chiasmally disrupted. No doubt this invites us to formulate an
adequate theory of the unity of the mind, but such a theory
would have to be brought into line with a great variety of
relevant phenomena that obtain in commissurally intact
subjects - for instance, forgetting and remembering, biofeed-
back, hypnosis and compartmentalized attention and discrim-
ination under hypnosis, amnesia, irrationality, unconscious
processes, delusional voices, neurosis, psychosis, multiple
personality, inconsistent mood swings, creativity, suggestibili-
ty, and the like. Such phenomena either support or are at least
consistent with the view that mental unity is, first of all, a
functional notion of some sort operating at the molar level;
second, somewhat tolerant of variously graded deviations
from any simple model of unified rational and explicitly
conscious control; and third, entirely compatible with any
empirical evidence in accord with which we might find
ourselves obliged to admit (as with alleged cases of extreme
dissociation) that there may be more than one center of such
mental unity obtaining in given subjects. To admit this,
however, is emphatically not to restrict the number of possi-
ble such centers to two (because, say, of the number of the
hemispheres) or to suppose that the submolar unities of
information processing assignable at the level of the cerebral
hemispheres directly bear on the individuation of functioning
minds as such.
Puccetti has simply conflated, then, two quite different
questions - the issue of the pattern of neural processing in the
brain and the issue of what is meant by the unity of the mind.
A careful distinction between the physical and functional
aspects of mental life and between the molar and the homun-
cular levels of functioning would help to recast the entire
split-brain literature in a more manageable and less mislead-
ing form.
Mental duality: An unmade case
Charles E. Marks
Department of Philosophy, University of Washington, Seattle, Wash.
98195
I shall comment on three of Puccetti's arguments for mental
duality and then make some remarks on what a case of this
sort requires. As Puccetti states them, all three arguments
assume that split-brain patients have two minds, a thesis
which is not argued for in the present paper; but this
assumption is essential to only one of them.
The crux of Puccetti's argument from the split brain to the
THE BEHAVIORAL AND BRAIN SCIENCES (1981), 4 111
Commentary/Puccetti: Mental duality
normal brain is the burden of proof he wishes to place on his
opponents. It is easily evaded or transferred. (1) The burden is
placed because "everything else about the primary visual
system is already explicable in terms of neural mechanisms."
In order to be relevant, this must mean that everything else
about the presumed contribution of the primary visual system
to the overall structure and organization of our conscious
visual experience is already thus explicable. But this isn't true;
and, even if it were, several important features of our visual
experience do not depend upon the primary visual system, if
its limits are narrowly construed. (2) There is a great deal of
behavioral evidence that a normal human being has one, not
two, experiences of seeing teacup under the stated conditions.
Further, there is, in light of the split-brain data, a clear
candidate for neural structure involved. At worst, there is no
detailed account of how the neural structure achieves its
effects on conscious experience. But, since the lack of such
accounts is the rule rather than the exception, the failure of
Puccetti's opponents to provide one can hardly be a telling
objection to their position. (3) If the burden of argument is
well placed, then Puccetti has a similar burden of his own. On
his view, when teacup is presented under appropriately
controlled conditions, the split-brain patient's right hemi-
sphere has a conscious experience of seeing tea. Under the
same conditions, the right hemisphere of the normal brain is
stimulated in the same way. Yet Puccetti assures us that it has
the single experience of seeing teacup. So the neural represen-
tations of tea and those of cup, which are transmitted by the
commissures from the left hemisphere, must be fused "into a
single image. " What neural mechanisms serve to explain this
and how do they differ in principle from neural transmissions
across the commissures?
Without the argument against the fusing mechanism, the
evolutionary considerations Puccetti presents, whatever their
merits, are neutral on the question of mental duality.
The hypothesis that we all have two minds is supposed to
receive some support because it solves an enigma about
split-brain patients. (1) The enigma, as posed, simply assumes
a two-minds account of the split-brain patients and an inter-
pretation of cross-cuing as a primitive intentional exchange of
information. Someone who has argued against this account
will not be moved by the ability of the mental-duality
hypothesis (with supporting assumptions) to explain puzzles
that only arise on this interpretation of the split-brain case. If
there aren't two minds, then there's no one to revolt, and the
refusal of the split-brain patient to acknowledge that there is
another is not enigmatic but correct. (2) There is a serious
internal difficulty in Puccetti's explanation as well: the puzzle
of mind-right's cooperativeness is solved only by making a
bigger mystery of mind-left's refusal to acknowledge its very
existence. Mind-right would, he claims, know from an early
age of the existence of mind-left because it would observe
left-hemisphere performances - speaking and writing - that
it knew were too complex for it to produce. Unless all the
speculation about right-hemisphere specialization is grossly in
error, then, on parallel grounds, the left hemisphere would
also witness a variety of performances at spatial (or name
your favorite right-hemisphere specialization) tasks too
complex for it to believe it was generating. Perhaps this is not
an objection but a contribution to the psychology of the major
hemisphere. It is either weak on inference (its post-surgical
performance shows how weak) or a liar.
Puccetti's final argument is that his theory, but not the
conventional view of the corpus callosum, predicts the two
kinds of bitemporal deficits cited in the last section. I won't
quibble about the loose sense of "predictability " involved.
The functional features of the visual system and the corpus
callosum, which must be assumed on either Puccetti's or the
conventional account, predict the stated results of optic-
chiasm disruption. The only difference between Puccetti and
112 THE BEHAVIORAL AND BRAIN SCIENCES (1981), 4
his opponent is on whether these patients have one or two
visual experiences of the entire visual field with both eyes
open or of the contralateral visual field with one eye open. So
it must be the visual deficit in the split-brain patient that is
predictable on Puccetti's view but not the conventional one.
But, in order to predict any conscious visual experience at all
in the split-brain patient, he has to assume that the neural
representations right and left suffice to produce visual experi-
ence in the absence of supplements via the commissures.
Given this assumption, the conventional theory predicts the
same visual defects in split-brain patients. Even if it didn't, I
don't see that that would provide much support for mental
duality; the conventional theory would, of course, be in bad
shape if it predicted (in a much tighter sense of predict)
something false.
If I am right, Puccetti's case for mental duality fails for
relatively uninteresting reasons. Moreover, it doesn't seem to
be the right sort of case, since almost any theory, however
implausible, will account for some facts. Unless we suddenly
begin to behave a lot more strangely than we do, there isn't
going to be a simple and intuitively plausible argument that
we all have two minds. By "intuitively plausible " I mean an
argument without any extensive and explicit commitments in
the philosophy of mind. As matters now stand, the best
strategy would be to argue, first, that split-brain patients have
two minds and, second, that this is best explained by their
having two minds before commissurotomy. Any attempt to
interpret the split-brain phenomena faces the mind-body
problem. One must decide, on some principled grounds, the
relation of various anatomic, neurological, and behavioral
data to mentalistic descriptions; and the proper account of the
mentalistic notions of prime concern - consciousness, mind,
and person - is, to put it mildly, controversial. What is unity
of consciousness? Can it be temporarily interrupted or must a
single mind always have a unified consciousness? If it can be
temporarily interrupted, how great a disruption can a single
mind tolerate? These are only a few of the questions that must
be explicitly addressed and answered in order to make a case
for mental duality in split-brain patients, and I do not see how
they can be satisfactorily answered without something like a
theory of what minds are. The argument to the best explana-
tion is going to be equally delicate since we don't exhibit the
behavior that is evidence for a disunified consciousness in
split-brain patients, and our failure to do so is explained by
the fact that our commissures are intact.
Neurometaphorology: The new faculty
psychology
Daniel N. Robinson
Department of Psychology, Georgetown University, Washington, D.C.
20057
In another of his interesting essays on the implications of
"split-brain" findings for philosophy of mind, Roland
Puccetti argues that the hypothesis of mental duality is
uniquely suited to explain the results of commissurotomy. His
historical searches take him back to Wigan's treatise of 1844
but then bring him very quickly to his own and to Bogen's
recent articles. Although historical priority and popularity are
scarcely pivotal in such matters, it should be noted that the
actual history of such notions is both longer and thicker than
Puccetti claims. I refer here not only to Sir Henry Holland's
specific treatment of the brain as a dual organ admitting of
independent hemispheric influences by each hemisphere on
the other (Holland 1840) but to the earlier and numerous
attacks on Gall's phrenology - attacks centering on the phre-

nologist's apparent rejection of mental unicity. Indeed, it was
just this that served as the linchpin of Flourens's strident
critique: "The consciousness tells me that I am one, and Gall
insists that I am multiple; that consciousness tells me that I am
free, and Gall avers that there is no moral liberty. . . . Philoso-
phers will talk" (Flourens, Eng. trans. 1846).
By the time phrenology had fallen out of favor, clinical
psychology was able to preserve interest in "double conscious-
ness" through studies of hysterical patients. Thus, Binet
would write: "The psychologists of France, during the past
few years, have been diligently at work studying the phenom-
enon of double consciousness and double personality in
hysterical patients" (Binet 1890). And in the same essay he
established that very nearly the same results were easily
obtained from healthy experimental subjects. In his larger
and popular work (Binet 1896) he concluded the following
from scores of experiments completed in widely scattered
laboratories:
1. Elements that enter normally into the constitution of our ego
may fall into a state of disaggregation.
2. A consciousness never ceases to accompany these elements,
although the ego loses consciousness of it.
3. Sometimes, under exceptional conditions, pathological or
experimental, these elements are organized into secondary person-
alities, (p. 348)
In much of this, Binet was following the lead of Theodule
Ribot, whose The Diseases of the Personality (1884; Eng.
trans. 1906) was widely read and contained an evolutionary
thesis, by the way, not unlike the one Puccetti has advanced
(Ribot, pp. 138-56).
But effects of the relevant sort are not limited to studies of
hysteria or to the use of "suggestion" or to the consequences
of documented or suspected neuropathies. A broad assort-
ment of psychophysical and cognitive findings, obtained from
normal subjects, can be adduced in support of "mental
duality" as Puccetti seems to be using the term (Robinson
1976a). Subjects in such studies may react as quickly to
unseen flashes as to those that are readily visible; may fail to
report a number or letter which they later "retrieve" when its
initial location is cued; may have a retroactively "masked"
stimulus unmasked by one that inhibits the mask. These are
all well-known effects routinely discussed within the context
of information processing and its complex "stages." What is
common within this otherwise diverse set of effects is what
might be called a state of epistemic contradiction: the subject
concurrently displays a knowledge and an ignorance of a
stimulus or class of stimuli. Given the nature and variety of
such findings, it seems only fair to contend that the effects of
commissurotomy do not uniquely sustain or address the
hypothesis of mental duality.
This is not to say that the performance of the commissur-
otomized patient is duplicated in any of these many different
settings - each of which yields something of a sui generis
result - but that other performances make as strong (or as
weak) a case for mental duality as that allegedly made by the
"split-brain" patient. The central question, then, is whether
any of these findings, alone or in combination, warrants the
conclusions reached by Puccetti. Note that more than one
conclusion is offered. In resting his case for mental duality,
Puccetti also rests his case for a personal, conscious, verbal,
(striving, hoping, just, and merciful?) cortical hemisphere (or
two). One must either accept this "or else . . . retreat into
mentalistic assumptions."
It is far from clear, however, that the attributes in question
forestall such a retreat merely by being heaped on hemi-
spheres instead of persons. If the independent clause just
quoted is intended as a tacit adoption of some sort of
mind/brain identity thesis - a kind of eliminative material-
ism - neither Puccetti's current essay nor those written specif-
ically in support of such a thesis can be said to have
Commentary /Puccetti: Mental duality
established its validity, or even its intelligibility (Robinson,
1976b). If, however, a less daring proposal is implied - one
that simply takes brain processes as somehow underlying
mental operations and states - then the clinical and experi-
mental literatures are actually too rich to be supportive. In
sketching the position of Sir John Eccles on this matter
(Popper & Eccles 1977), Puccetti concludes his review with
exclamatory punctuation intended, one would assume, to
register his incredulity. But if what stands in doubt here is the
variety of complex, "purposive," and prolonged chains of
behavior emitted by those who are otherwise utterly uncon-
scious of these, it is useful to consult the older studies of Binet
and his contemporaries. Yet what such a review will turn up is
not merely evidence of mental duality, but of mental multi-
plicity, and it is in just this respect that the literature is too
rich. There are, alas, only two hemispheres, a convenient fact
for the duality hypothesis, but a hardship for those who would
make sense of three, four,. . . n "states of mind" or "n-
minds."
In beginning his argument with a reference to Copernicus
and Galileo, Puccetti alerts us to the perils of undue allegiance
to conventional wisdom. Such wisdom is, of course, often no
more than a congeries of superstition and intellectual sloth.
Thus, I do not defend the concept of mental unicity out of a
reluctance to abandon convention. Instead, I am moved by an
awareness of the value of parsimony in scientific discourse
and by a recognition of the mischief once caused by those
who took each isolated fact of mind as suggestive of an
isolated "faculty." The vagaries of disease and the ingenuity
of experimenters are sufficient to produce patients and
subjects who display many varieties of what I have called
epistemic contradiction. Tactical decisions in such cases
should be guided by anticipating the unproductive confusion
invited by the habit of multiplying minds and selves each
time disaster or experimental design increases the number of
contradictory epistemic states (or statements). The alternative
to restraint here would soon install minor hemispheres as
"helots," only to summon a concern, in these litigious times,
for their rights. One would have thought that by now there
would be general agreement that the proper business of
science is the search for a theory able to integrate all of the
relevant facts, rather than the minting of special theories to
meet the challenge presented by every new fact. It was the
latter course that finally captured Gall and his school and that
thereby cast an indelible shadow across an otherwise produc-
tive and distinguished scientific career.
Puccetti's mental-duality thesis: A case of
bad arguments
Barbara Von Eckardt
Department of Philosophy. Yale University, New Haven, Conn. 06520
Puccetti offers us a potpourri of loosely formulated argu-
ments in support of his hypothesis that both normal humans
and split-brain patients have two centers of consciousness -
henceforth "N2S2" - and against the two rival hypotheses
that have been seriously entertained: that both normal
humans and split-brain patients have only one center of
consciousness - "NISI" - and that normal humans have one
but split-brain patients have two centers of consciousness -
"N1S2." (No one evidently holds the logically possible fourth
alternative, that normals have two but split-brain patients
have only one center of consciousness.) Puccetti's arguments
are uniformly unconvincing.
According to Puccetti, NISI - Eccles's view - should be
rejected because (a) it gets us into a "conceptual morass" and
(b) it cannot explain what goes on with split-brain patients. If
THE BEHAVIORAL AND BRAIN SCIENCES (1981), 4 113
Commentary/Puccetti: Mental duality
by (a) he means that there is no consistent way of describing
split-brain data without subscribing to a dual-consciousness
position, this is simply false. One need only revert to the
neutral language (neutral on the question of consciousness) of
mental representation and information processing. Assume
that both the left brains of split-brain individuals (hereafter
"L.B.") and their right brains ("R.B.") can represent informa-
tion from the environment and utilize this information for the
purposes of behavioral response. Then, in the teacup experi-
ment, we can say that L.B. forms a visual representation of
cup and uses this representation to mediate its verbal
response, while R.B. forms a visual representation of tea and
uses it to mediate its pointing response. The patient as a whole
has a visual representation of both tea and cup but not of
teacup. There is no morass in sight. Note that, as described,
this state of affairs is compatible with (i) only L.B., (ii) only
R.B., (iii) both L.B. and R.B., or even (iv) neither L.B. nor
R.B., seeing the relevant words consciously.
Puccetti puts (b) in the form of a question: how can R.B.
"see," "hear," "react," or "think" if it is only an automaton?
Depending on how seriously we take Puccetti's scare quotes,
the implicit argument either begs the question or has very
little force. If see, hear, etc. are being used in their ordinary
sense, in which to see, hear, or think is to do so consciously,
then he is obviously begging the question. On the other hand,
if these terms are merely being used as a shorthand for a
neutral information-processing or functional description, then
there is no reason to believe that an automaton could not
"see" (i.e., encode visual information), "hear" (i.e., encode
auditory information), etc. in that sense. AI (artificial intelli-
gence) is in the business of designing automata with precisely
such cognitive capacities.
Against N1S2 - Gazzaniga's view - Puccetti argues that if
one assumes that the arrival of neural messages in area 17 (or
the prestriate cortex) is sufficient for consciousness in split-
brain patients, then it ought to be sufficient for consciousness
in the normal brain. And since we do not have two images,
there must be two separate centers of consciousness. This is a
little like arguing that since strenuous exertion is sufficient to
kill a heart patient, it ought to be sufficient to kill a normally
healthy person.
These are his principle arguments against the rival hy-
potheses. In support of his own view, Puccetti contends that
N2S2 can explain "a great number of hitherto unexplained
facts" as well as predict facts that "can be documented in the
literature . . . but [which] have gone unnoticed until now."
Fine and good. But he fails to note an important methodologi-
cal point. Such explanations and predictions can only provide
significant support for his hypothesis if they distinguish it
from its rivals. But, in fact, they do no such thing. Given
reasonable additional assumptions, all three of the rival hy-
potheses can explain Puccetti's array of facts equally well.
Let me give just two examples. Fact number 1 is that a
split-brain patient may engage in left-to-right-hand cuing
where R.B. has received visual information that L.B. is being
asked about. First of all, whether normals have two centers of
consciousness is completely irrelevant to the explanation of
this fact. Second, whether R.B. is conscious is also irrelevant.
It is certainly true that the obvious explanation of the cuing
behavior relies on attributing to R.B. certain propositional
attitudes, such as that R.B. recognized that L.B. needed the
information and wanted to help L.B. out. But it requires an
independent argument to show that an individual truly
described by propositional attitudes must be conscious, and
Puccetti fails even to hint at such an argument.
Fact #2 is that split-brain patients do not believe that they
have more than one center of consciousness. Again, that part
of Puccetti's hypothesis which deals with normals is irrele-
vant, while the part that deals with split-brain patients fails to
114 THE BEHAVIORAL AND BRAIN SCIENCES (1981), 4
have an explanatory edge over its rival. There are at least two
plausible explanations for fact number 2. Split-brain patients
do not believe that they have more than one center of
consciousness either because, in fact, they don't (NISI), or
because L.B., which controls the expression of such beliefs,
does not have introspective access to the consciousness of R.B.
- N1S2 and N2S2.
A close look at the remaining "unexplained facts," as well
as at the prediction about double hemianopia, will reveal that
they too fail to support Puccetti's case. In each case, the
reason is the same: although N2S2 can explain or predict the
fact in question, so can each of the rivals. Hence, nothing is
gained in favor of Puccetti's mental-duality thesis.
Extinction and hemi-inattention: Their
relation to commissurotomy
Edwin A. Weinstein
7603 Holiday Terrace, Bethesda. Maryland 20034'
The phenomena of extinction and hemi-inattention are
central to a consideration of the effects of section of the
corpus callosum. Extinction, elicited by the method of double
simultaneous stimulation (DSS), was demonstrated in dogs by
Jacques Loeb in 1884 and applied to the examination of
patients by Hermann Oppenheim in the following year
(Benton 1956). If a person with a unilateral brain lesion is
touched simultaneously on both sides of his body, he does not
perceive the stimulus on the side opposite the lesion, even
though he had responded correctly to a single stimulus.
Poppelreuter (1917) described extinction in the visual sphere
and termed it "hemianopic weakness of attention." Bender
(1952; 1970) showed that extinction could result from
pinprick, graphesthetic, stereognostic, gustatory, and audi-
tory stimuli. Extinction occurs slightly more frequently in
cases of right-hemisphere lesions, but the difference is not
significant (Schwartz, Marchok, Kreinick, & Flynn 1979).
Contralateral and ipsilateral extinction are common in
patients with diffuse cortical disease, particularly when the
stimuli are not homologous. DSS in the face-hand combina-
tion elicits extinction of the hand in normal children up to the
age of six. In everyday life we are bombarded constantly and
simultaneously with numerous stimuli, most of which we
extinguish.
Hemi-inattention or hemineglect is generally regarded as a
more severe and enduring form of extinction. All patients
with hemineglect show extinction, but not vice versa. The
patient who extinguishes in the visual mode is usually able, by
the use of compensatory head and eye movements, to read
and write without lateralized omissions; but the hemi-
inattentive subject ignores letters and words on one side. Only
patients with conspicuous neglect show both unimodal and
cross-modal extinction: in the latter, for example, a noise in
one ear nullifies a touch on the opposite hand. Most patients
with only unilateral extinction have a normal mental status,
while subjects who show the striking instances of neglect cited
by Puccetti (in the sixth paragraph of the section "Mute
hemispheric cooperativeness in man: an enigma resolved")
manifest other disturbances of behavior. These include altera-
tions in mood: patients appear indifferent to their situation;
some are euphoric, others withdrawn and selectively mute.
Disorders of memory, confabulation, disorientation, and
reduplication for place, time, and/or person, and nonaphasic
misnaming are commonly present. These phenomena indi-
cate involvement of the limbic-reticular system. Hemineglect
occurs not only with lesions of the parietal lobe but with other
lesions that interfere with cortio-limbic-reticular connections

(Weinstein & Friedland 1977; Heilman & Watson 1977). It is
likely that the predominance of left-sided over right-sided
hemineglect is due to the asymmetry of these connections
(Weinstein & Friedland 1977).
Whereas the laterality of extinction and hemineglect in
patients with hemisphere lesions is determined by the site of
the pathology, a number of factors are involved after commis-
surotomy. These include hemisphere specialization, the antic-
ipatory set, the nature of the task to be performed, the
strategy used, and the mode of execution. Tactile extinction,
which involves no hemisphere specialization, occurs on either
side of the body with equal frequency. The left side is usually
extinguished in tasks involving language. Jerre Levy (1977)
studied visual extinction and completion of chimeric figures.
She showed pictures made up of two incompatible right and
left halves and found that the patients did not note their
chimeric character but reported a whole object. The experi-
ment was designed to determine whether the patient
matched to a whole picture on the basis of visual similarity
(right-hemisphere control) or according to a conceptual cate-
gory (left-hemisphere control). After finding that patients'
choices were strongly influenced by the wording of the
instructions, Levy concluded that a hemisphere takes control
of processing and behavior with what it thinks it can do and
only indirectly in accordance with its actual abilities. She
suggests that the task instructions are analyzed by both
cerebral cortices, directed to the midline reticular system
from which one hemisphere is activated and the other inhib-
ited in accordance with cognitive demands.
The more conspicuous signs of hemineglect, as Puccetti
notes, do not appear after commissurotomy. Nor does the
split-brain patient show overt behavioral disturbances. This
situation may be attributed to the fact that the surgical
procedure does not usually involve limbic structures and the
brain stem commissures. Extracallosal damage, however, may
occur as a result of the operation, and implication of the
cingulate area probably accounts for the periods of muteness
that follow operation in some cases. It is important to remem-
ber that no commissurotomized subject has yet come to
autopsy.
Puccetti, however, does not recognize the similarities
between hemineglect and the callosal syndrome. Although
the hemi-inattentive patient ignores one side, he often shows
what may be called an emotional and social awareness of
events on that side. This awareness, or knowledge, may be
displayed in condensed metaphor, humor, colloquialisms,
cliches, and other forms of "social language. ' For example, a
man who neglected his useless left arm called it a "canary
claw, yellow and shrivelled." A woman referred to her
paralyzed left arm as "my Hitler." As mentioned, some
patients simply close their eyes and do not speak when
questioned about the affected side of the body. Some hemi-
inattentive subjects refer to an affected arm as "he," "she," or
"it," "disowning" it in the way a left hemisphere after callosal
section may complain about a rebellious left hand. Gazzaniga
(1970) reported the case of a postcommissurotomy subject
who, when a sexy pinup was flashed in the left field of vision,
denied that she had seen anything, but giggled unmistakably.
Sperry, Zaidel, and Zaidel (1979), whose work is cited by
Puccetti, noted that under similar circumstances the split-
brain subject gives emotionally appropriate responses to
pictures of the personal self, family, and political figures.
Puccetti has made a brilliant argument for the view that
there is double representation of conscious experience. He has
suggested that the major function of the intact corpus callo-
sum is to maintain such dual-mindedness - in other words, to
regulate extinction. He has not, however, considered the role
of the limbic-reticular system. The phenomena of hemi-
inattention indicate the likelihood of asymmetric activation
Commentary/Puccetti: Mental duality
of one hemisphere from the reticular formation. If, as
suggested by Guiard (in press), one accepts the operational
concept of attention as a substitute for consciousness, then we
can indeed have a singleness of consciousness.
NOTE
'Professor of Neurology Emeritus, Mount Sinai Medical School,
New York.
Unfused homunculi
K. V. Wilkes
Department of Philosophy, St. Hilda's College, Oxford OX4 1DY, England
One argument for the mental duality that Puccetti presses is
the alleged absence of any "neural mechanism" adequate to
accomplish the fusion of the distinct contents of each cerebral
hemisphere. This is a puzzling point. First, it is somewhat
misleading to look for evidence of "a" mechanism that
suffices to do this; the brain is not thus neatly and consider-
ately packaged, and since any "fusion" will involve much
more than just the visual input, we would need "fusion" at
various levels and stages of the information processing. But
more importantly, what is wrong with the existing equip-
ment? We know that there are millions of connecting fibers
linking all parts of the two cerebral hemispheres; the highly
complex and many-staged process of recognizing a word like
teacup (a process which Puccetti tends to oversimplify) in
either hemisphere engages many diverse brain areas, all of
which have commissural links with their counterparts in the
other hemisphere. All the "fusion" that we need is here. Of
course, if one unwisely uses a model of brain function that
locates "the" recognition of teacup at point p in area x of the
left hemisphere, then one may become puzzled about its
relationship to the teacup in p, x in the right hemisphere - but
we know that the physical processes of perception and
perceptual recognition don't work like that. Furthermore,
what would count as evidence that all these cerebral intercon-
nections plus the complex processing in each hemisphere do,
or do not, constitute "a" fusing mechanism?
Let me illustrate the point. Suppose for a moment that all
brains came singly - no duplicity. Then each of us, while
having two eyes, would have a single visual cortex. One might
then ask how the two visual inputs can fuse into a single
perception - where is the fusing mechanism? The reply,
surely, would be to describe in as much detail as possible what
is known about what happens: the retinal reactions, the
transmission of impulses along the optic nerve, the point-
by-point response of specific neurons in the primary visual
cortex, the subsequent processing of this data in further
regions of the brain, and so forth. (Incidentally, one would try
to disabuse the questioner of the idea that there is "a"
percept, or "a" point at which a teacup, or the word teacup,
was registered.) If after all this he still asked "But where and
how does the fusing happen?" one could only sigh and repeat
the explanation more slowly: this happens, and then that, and
one day we'll know more about the role of the angular gyrus
region . . . and that's the story; that's how we do it. (Indeed, if
Puccetti feels the absence of such mechanisms, he should
perhaps be worried by one conspicuously absent mechanism
in his own account - the mechanism that would switch motor
control from one hemisphere-homunculus to another.)
More generally, Puccetti strikes me as overfond of the
notion that there are precise locations for specific functions,
too eager to assign responsibility for $-ing to this region
rather than that, thereby neglecting the fact that most inter-
esting <t>s will be highly complex, many-staged and many-
THE BEHAVIORAL AND BRAIN SCIENCES (1981), 4 115
Response/Puccetti: Mental duality
sided brain-and-body activities. For example, there is an odd
argument in paragraph 6 of the introduction: "it would be
absurd to impute mental functions to the organism as a whole,
or even to the whole brain, since destruction of the cerebral
cortex is enough by itself to render a human permanently
nonsentient and noncognitive" (italics mine). The implica-
tion, I take it, is that it would be correct to impute these
functions to the cerebral cortex, and so we should change our
absurd habit of talking as though it were people who lied,
laughed, and loved. Instead, necessary conditions for <£-ing
should be credited with 0-ing. However, there are many bits
of a car engine which are such that, if they were destroyed,
the car would not and could not move, accelerate, or slow
down; if we can't say that the car does all these things, which
of the various candidate bits (starter, clutch, differential,
petrol pump, transmission, spark plugs, etc.) should we pick
on as responsible and hence as the true mover, accelerator,
and so forth?
It is this unfortunate concentration upon specific brain
parts and particular "mechanisms" that goes hand in hand
with Puccetti's otherwise laudable willingness to tolerate
homunculi. These harmless creatures have been cold-shoul-
dered by philosophers and neuropsychologists for too long,
and it is time that their sterling service was acknowledged.
But the reason for welcoming them back into a bureaucracy
of the brain (and I would welcome not just Puccetti's two, but
dozens) is their harmlessness. To paraphrase Gunderson
(1971, p. 81) stones and people alike roll down hills and gather
no moss, which does not make one a borderline case of the
other; and just as stones don't get giddy, so likewise a
homunculus responsible for, say, "transmitting information-
bits" need not be credited with existential angst concerning
the content of the information ("Homunculi do not exist")
that it transmits. Puccetti, and I, want to allow scientists to
ascribe to adequately complex cerebral processes whatever
they need to ascribe in order to explain, at their chosen level
of generality, how the thing works; the right hemisphere gets
credited with many psychological predicates, and deservedly
so. But there is as yet no reason to infer that because humans
of whom all these predicates were true would need to have
the self-sacrifioing patience of a saint, the right hemisphere
therefore consciously and resignedly accepts hemispheric
helotry. The humble homunculus is one thing; a homunculus
that is humble is quite another. Philosophers have learned
from brain and computer studies the fascinating, and perhaps
surprising, fact that sets of psychological predicates that
standardly go together in us need not go together in other
entities of which some are true (the computer does not mind
losing at chess). It would, I suggest, be a mistake to ask
scientists to humanize their homunculi. And it is only with
unfused and humanized homunculi that Puccetti's "mental
duality" would pose a serious threat to the notion of a "unity
of consciousness" that he, like many others, seems to regard as
central to our concept of personal identity.
Author's Response
Consensus and progress in brain science
Roland Puccetti
Department of Philosophy, Dalhousie University, Halifax, Nova Scotia,
Canada B3H3J5
In a recent "letter to the editor" that appeared in Time
magazine, a reader had this to say of Dr. Carl Sagan's
attempts to popularize existing scientific consensuses:
116 THE BEHAVIORAL AND BRAIN SCIENCES (1981), 4
Popularizing established consensus hardly promotes
progress. It took Pasteur decades to convince the
world that life did not originate from spontaneous
generation. The contrary consensus prevented
serious consideration of his arguments. As a result,
progress in bacteriology was delayed. (Wesley L.
Fankhauser, November 10, 1980.)
I think that this is especially a danger for multidiscipli-
nary journals such as the present one, and I therefore
welcome the opportunity here to defend anew the case
for mental duality against its many critics.
I. The "know-nothing" attitude. I begin with Church-
land's contention that "being conscious" is so ill-
defined theoretically at this stage of mind-brain
science that counting centers of consciousness is like
counting angels on the head of a pin, or debating how
many "vital spirits" perfuse an organism. I agree that
consciousness is — like these other venerable entities —
itself unobservable (Puccetti & Dykes 1978); but
Churchland surely knows what being conscious is, if
she has ever recovered from a faint or a deep sleep; and
any anesthesiologist can tell her more than she wants to
know about neurological correlates of being in a
conscious as opposed to an unconscious or semicon-
scious state. Once this much is understood, the move to
asking whether the vertebrate brain supports only one
center of consciousness or really two (or more, a matter
to be raised in the next section) no longer appears
theological or pseudoscientific but straightforwardly
empirical.
Green similarly despairs of bringing new data from
the neurosciences to bear on philosophy's age-old ques-
tions about the mind-body relationship - but what is so
difficult about this? All we need to know is that
consciousness arises from brain activity, and then we
must learn enough about brain structures and function
to be in a position to raise philosophically interesting
questions. If we don't do this, if we insist that philoso-
phy by its very nature cannot assimilate such data, then
we are condemning philosophy to an ascientific future
not unlike the past of alchemy and astrology.
Joynt, though for a very different reason, concurs in
Churchland's pessimism. As a clinical neurologist, he
says, he has been trained not to conjecture about the
patient's states of consciousness, but to heed his respon-
siveness to stimuli. This "black box" approach no doubt
appeals to those who are schooled in old-fashioned
behaviorism, but then what is Joynt to do with a patient
presenting with a callosal lesion who (a) talks perfectly
well, (b) accurately picks out with his left hand an item
that had been palpated in that hand out of sight earlier,
but (c) cannot name the object while it is still in his
hand (Geschwind 1965)? Surely Joynt is going to
wonder why, if the patient knows what is in the left
hand, he cannot name it. And that, in effect, amounts
to conjecturing about the patient's states of mind.
Indeed, the failure of classical behaviorism to allow
raising such questions is one of the reasons for its
present and ongoing demise.
For Margolis, on the other hand, agnosticism on the
numerical aspects of consciousness is counseled by the
observation that beneath the skin surface all is informa-
tion processing at a "homuncular" level, while

consciousness manifests itself only at the "molar" level.
Since Margolis apparently conflates "molar" with the
whole organism, this means that there can be only one
mind no matter how many variations are observed in
homuncular information processing with intact sub-
jects, commissurotomized subjects, and chiasmally
disrupted subjects. It would be difficult to provide a
more forthright example of question-begging than this.
And as if that were not enough, he asserts near the end
that unless I can explain sixteen other psychological
phenomena related to the problem of the unity of the
mind, no theory of mental duality need be seriously
entertained!
But even Margolis's best efforts are surpassed by
those of Von Eckardt. She appears to hold the convic-
tion that unless an argument is straightforwardly
deductive it must be a bad, or even terrible, argument.
For example, in the cross-cuing behavior described, she
says that it requires an "independent argument" to
show that an individual truly described by proposi-
tional attitudes must be conscious. Of course, the must
here is not a logical must but an inference from
behavior. Thus, suppose I dropped in on a party and
were invited to play charades with Von Eckardt as my
silent partner, and she did all the usual gesturing to cue
me as to the target word; if I were then challenged
afterwards to come up with an independent argument
justifying my belief that she did this consciously, I
don't know where I would find one. By her own
standard, in that case, I would have no right to
continue believing she was not just an automaton who
went through those gestures to help me guess the
correct word. But I suppose that in some philosophical
quarters setting an arbitrarily high standard for argu-
ment is an easy way to denounce an opponent's case.
II. The "committee" view of the mind. Even more
numerous have been those commentators who chose
the tactic of dissipation: if not just one mind, why not
indefinitely many? (And it may come as no surprise
than some actually tried both gambits.)
Bradshaw, for example, says it is not implausible to
talk about a mosaic of conscious as well as unconscious
selves. Brown speaks of discrete populations of neurons
in area 17 of each hemisphere as possible evidence for
multiple conscious states. Churchland says that the
brain may be fitted out with a "synod of self-monitor-
ing mechanisms," with none functioning as the "center
of consciousness." Geschwind says there is not only
duality but multiplicity of consciousness within each
cerebral hemisphere. Joynt asks why dual conscious-
ness cannot be extended to three or even a hundred
minds. LeDoux & Gazzaniga reassert their view that
what we call the mind is really a "composite of mental
systems." Robinson refers to Binet in support of
mental multiplicity. Wilkes says that she would
welcome back into the bureaucracy of the brain not
just my two "homunculi" but dozens.
I appreciate this show of generosity by my critics,
but my object was not to vastly populate the world with
additional minds, and I think I can show what is wrong
with this model of the mind as a sort of committee.
Take any three friends and ask them to imagine being,
respectively, visual cortex, auditory cortex, and a
Response/Puccetti: Mental duality
limbic center connected with a single cerebral hemi-
sphere. Then entertain the picture of all three attend-
ing to, say, an attractive member of the opposite sex
slowly disrobing to the music of bongo drums. One
friend sees the dancer disrobing, but hears and feels
nothing. Another friend hears the music, but sees and
feels nothing. The third feels sexually aroused but,
seeing and hearing nothing, hasn't a clue why. This is
absurd, yet it is the committee model of mentality. I for
one know it does not model my mind, for in the
imaginative exercise / would be seeing, hearing, and
feeling aroused. And not as some kind of committee
chairman receiving reports from members, but as the
original subject of these experiences. My root conten-
tion is only that I am not alone in this intracranial
audience: there is someone else in a darkened half of
the same theater having experiences like mine; but,
unlike me, he does not talk or write about them.
III. Some confusions dispelled. This seems the appro-
priate place to attempt to "cure" some lingering ques-
tions about what it is, exactly, that I am asserting.
Bradshaw thinks that I hold that the normal mind is
"already divided"; in fact, I claim that it is unitary, but
that there are two of them, with each receiving sensory
input from the other. Churchland says that even if two
"mechanisms" are operating in the right and left
hemispheres, the notion that "one's" inner life would
thus be a "tandem affair" is as implausible as inferring
from the absence of a scotoma that the retina of the eye
is unlesioned. It is rare to come upon an error illus-
trated with another error. Retinal lesions do cause
noticeable scotomas; it is lesions to the visual cortex
itself that go unremarked. However, to say that "one's"
inner life would be a tandem affair is to presuppose the
question at issue; it would be more accurate to conceive
two parallel inner lives going on, each based in the
neuronal activity of the left or right cerebral hemi-
sphere.
Davidson believes that I am holding that each
hemisphere transfers only unconscious information to
the other, blocking the transmission of conscious mate-
rial. Rather, I argue that conscious sensory material is
registered twice, first in one and then in the other
hemisphere, but that neither has introspective access to
the conscious contents of the other half brain. Margolis
mistakenly represents me as believing that mental
duality obtains in the commissurotomized and normal
subject "in the same way." I do not, holding instead
that the former has two visually deprived minds as a
result of the surgery; what is common to the split and
the normal is of course the presence of two parallel
streams of consciousness. Margolis also thinks I contra-
dict myself when I refer to the split-brain subject in the
teacup example as "he." But "he" there refers to a
single human organism, and leaves open the question
of how many minds that organism has. Marks persists
in misrepresenting my position as an argument that
"we all have two minds." Rather, I hold that every
normal human organism (and every normal vertebrate,
for that matter) has two minds, one of which is
certainly not the mind of a philosopher! Von Eckardt,
in a neat reversal of Margolis's point, claims that there
is no conceptual morass in the teacup example since,
THE BEHAVIORAL AND BRAIN SCIENCES (1981), 4 117
Response/Puccetti: Mental duality
after all, a part of the patient sees tea and another part
cup, as if two half-visual-field representations are the
same as one whole one. (Incidentally, the term concep-
tual morass was not applied by me to Eccles's position,
about which more later; nor, contra Von Eckardt, do
neural messages from the contralateral hemisphere
reach prestriate cortex - if that is the receiving area for
ipsilateral half visual space - in split-brain patients. But
then what can one expect from someone who suggests
that split-brain patients may not believe that they have
more than one center of consciousness "because, in
fact, they don't," which is comparable to saying that
small children may not believe they have two lungs to
breathe with because, in fact, they don't?)
IV. Mental numerosity. In her attempt to defuse my
claim that the corpus callosum is not a fusing mecha-
nism (about which more later), Wilkes pictures the
whole brain with all its interconnections as itself a
fusing mechanism - a not unfamiliar technique for
clouding the issue. (LeDoux & Cazzaniga similarly
conflate the problem of cellular multiplicity versus
subjective conscious unity on the one hand with the
problem of hemispheric duality and conscious unity on
the other.) But Wilkes then makes the interesting claim
that even if all brains came singly there would still be a
fusing problem, for how could input from the two eyes
to a single visual cortex "fuse" into a single perception?
We must get two points straight right now.
First, while I myself (Puccetti & Dykes 1978) and
many others concede that the subjective unity of the
visual field does not appear explicable on neurophysio-
logical principles, given the punctate mosaic of the
retina, the discreteness of retinal fibers projecting to
the visual cortex and the multiple cells in the receptor
sheet at the back of the brain, etc., this has nothing at
all to do with the problem of how what should be two
full subjective fields side-by-side (one in each hemi-
sphere due to commissural relay) are fused into one
(Sperry 1977). That is a problem of interhemispheric,
and not intrahemispheric, dimensions.
Second, there are indeed species of animals with
binocular vision but single brains and presumably a
single visual receiving area: cephalopods such as the
octopus. For such animals I would not, therefore, make
any claim of mental duality. However, all vertebrate
species including man are twin-brained, with neuronal
machinery for the duplication of sensory experience; it
is for them and them alone that the fusing problem
arises. (Apparently marsupials have no corpus callo-
sum, but the anterior commissure may duplicate visual
effects, as it appears to do in humans with agenesis of
the corpus callosum; Saul & Sperry 1968).
Now it is no answer to this problem to say trium-
phantly, as Wilkes does, that people rather than parts
of brain do this or that, by analogy with automobiles
rather than bits of engines doing the accelerating.
People don't see with their feet, any more than cars
accelerate by means of their taillights. And if it turns
out, as it has, that there is double representation for the
full subjective visual field in the normal vertebrate
brain, then anyone who wants to argue that there is
nevertheless only one seeing mind in such animals is
going to have to solve the fusing problem, rather than
118 THE BEHAVIORAL AND BRAIN SCIENCES (1981), 4
just wave it away.
Bogen, rather surprisingly, seems to be backing
away from his earlier position (Bogen 1969) on the
grounds that if two minds are based in two cerebral
hemispheres found in the same head, then the case for
saying they are two is weakened. But nothing he says in
that connection seems to provide strong support for this
capitulation. First, it is not strictly true that the discon-
nected hemispheres of the split-brain patient are "in
the same place at the same time" (which would make
them one half brain by Leibniz's Law), though they are
within the same (cranial) space at all times. It is true
that, given the same intracorporeal environment, not to
mention bilateral tactile representation for the skin
above the neck and for pain, their experiences are
going to be in many respects parallel. And, as Bogen
says, if the commissural connections could be restored,
so that sensory duplication between them prevailed
once more, the parallelism would be greatly rein-
forced. Nevertheless - and this is the observation Bogen
and many others seem to overlook - parallelism is not
singleness.
Start with monozygotic twins raised together. They
are alike, but surely not one. Next, try Siamese twins.
Since they are conjoined, the parallelism is greater, yet
they are surely still two. Now think of a dicephalous
human, the left head containing only a left hemisphere
and the right head a right one. Since one may talk and
the other not, one sleep through a concert while the
other appears to be in raptures, I believe we would say
there are two minds here even though the parallelism
has increased. Now take a split-brain human. Again an
increase, but still two minds. Finally, a commissurally
intact human. Unless good grounds can be found for
claiming that the experiences of the two connected
hemispheres fuse into one common experience, we still
have mental duality, even if it is now powerfully
concealed. It makes absolutely no difference to the
logic of the situation how parallel the experiences of
each half brain are, for in the absence of genuine
integration duality still prevails. Fred Astaire and
Ginger Rogers may have danced as one, but they were
two nonetheless.
Bogen may have overlooked this vital point because
of the ambiguity of our language of identity. He refers,
for example, to the dependence of the results in visual
testing of split-brain patients upon the particular stim-
uli used, referring no doubt to the fact that peripheral
stimuli are picked up in both the disconnected hemi-
spheres (Trevarthen & Sperry 1973). Marks (1980) has
tried to make this a telling objection against duality
even in the split condition. However, the result is easily
explained in terms of subcortical midbrain-retinal
secondary visual pathways that are intact after the
surgery and serve to alert each hemisphere simulta-
neously (for a quicker orienting response) to an atten-
tion-deserving movement in the peripheral visual field;
they signal a possible visual target that, particularly in
binocular animals, cannot be clearly seen and decoded
without first being fixated directly. So what is going on
in each of the two disconnected hemispheres is an
exactly similar perception: what philosophers call qual-
itative identity. This certainly does not amount to
numerical or quantitative identity of the perception -

any more than if you and I, if we were looking at the
night sky with arms companionably placed on each
other's shoulders and simultaneously saw a flashing
comet off to our right, would have one and only one
perception of it between us. Brown is also caught up in
this ambiguity when he says that commissural section-
ing does not disclose a preexisting dual consciousness
but rather "prevents the right-hemisphere component
of a shared cognitive level from being derived for a
left-hemisphere end stage." What is meant here by
"shared"? Does the cognitive level bridge both hemi-
spheres, or is it present in duplicate in each? Here, as
elsewhere in brain science, much hinges upon the exact
meaning of the words we use.
I turn finally to the contribution of Sir John Eccles.
As was made clear by the quote in Joynt's commenta-
ry, as recently as 1970 Eccles held to the view that
processes in the right hemisphere are not accompanied
by conscious experience, by analogy with the goings-on
in a computer (Eccles 1976). In his later book with
Popper (Popper & Eccles 1977) there was no essential
modification of this in the chapter on split brains and
hemispherectomies, for, as he repeats now, his point
was that "with the commissurotomy patient the minor
hemisphere gives no conscious experience to the
subject." One should not fail to note that as this
statement stands it is question-begging, for it identifies
"the subject" with the major or speaking hemisphere
following disconnection, whereas what we want to
know is whether a disconnected mute hemisphere is
not also the basis for a conscious mind, hence a "sub-
ject" in its own right.
Eccles now allows a limited self-consciousness in the
nonspeaking hemisphere as a result of recent testing
(Sperry, Zaidel, & Zaidel 1979), but doubts that it is
sufficient to support our concept of a person, and in
any case feels that it would be submerged into a
unitary, left-hemisphere-dominant consciousness if the
half brains could be reconnected. I shall not here
pursue the question of the person-status of the mute
hemisphere, since my prime target is the more modest
(!) one of mental duality; but I will remark in passing
that I still hold to the two-person view (Puccetti 1973),
on grounds that, unlike Bogen (1969), I cannot make
sense of one person's having two minds. However, it
should strike any attentive reader that on the conven-
tional view supported by Eccles and others, something
very strange is going on if a mind can be converted into
two minds by forebrain commissurotomy, then recon-
verted into one mind by restoration of the commissural
connections. If ever we were able to do that, we should
have someone, say patient L.B., who truly remembers
having to guess at the identity of a picture of Hitler
while he also remembers at some nonverbal level
trying to cue himself as to its identity even though he
could very well see it was Hitler! Mental duality may
be a weird theory, but in some respects it is not as weird
as the theory it is trying to replace.
V. Attentional mechanisms. Even in the split-brain
patient or animal, Bogen remarks, there are two limbic
systems tightly coupled at the hypothalamic level, and
that with sagittal section of the brainstem (a trench is
aspirated through the cerebellum) split-brain cats can
Response/Puccetti: Mental duality
sleep one hemisphere at a time. Bradshaw speaks of
undivided midbrain attentional mechanisms "assign-
ing" functional processing to one or the other hemi-
sphere, which to him suggests that there is "never a
double stream of consciousness, but at most merely a
fluctuating cognitive style." But unless Bradshaw
wants to maintain that when its cognitive specialization
is not called for a hemisphere becomes unconscious, the
shifting emphasis of attentional mechanisms does noth-
ing to show that there is not dual consciousness. Simi-
larly, Weinstein notes that the phenomena of hemi-
inattention indicate the likelihood of asymmetric hemi-
spheric activation stemming from the limbic-reticular
system, and he goes on to suggest that if one accepts an
"operational" concept of attention as equivalent to
consciousness, then this amounts to singleness of
consciousness. Again, it does nothing of the sort, for to
alert a given hemisphere to incoming stimuli is not to
render its cerebral companion obtunded.
What is more, split-brain experiments clearly show
that both hemispheres can be fully attending at the
same time. Trevarthen (1962) showed that split-brain
monkeys could learn contradictory visual-discrimina-
tion tasks simultaneously, and surely the identification
task Sperry, Zaidel, and Zaidel (1979) described in my
target article requires both an attentive seeing, cueing
mute hemisphere and an attentive unseeing, guessing
verbal hemisphere. These data are flatly at odds with
the "singular attentional mechanism" theory, which
may in any case simply reflect the conventional preju-
dice that where you have one minded human body you
can only have one mind tending the store.
VI. Counterevidence. The distinction of being the only
commentators to have attempted to present experi-
mental counterevidence with regard to mental duality
goes to Anderson & Gonsalves. They observe, correct-
ly, that if, as Sperry (1970) originally suggested, area 18
or prestriate cortex is the terminus for commissural
fibers relaying visual information from the contrala-
teral hemisphere for ipsilateral body space, then lesions
to both areas 17 and 18 in the left hemisphere should
produce verbal reports of blindness. They found no
such case in the literature, but they say that partial
lesions suggest that a loss is reported only for the right
visual half field. Of course, everything depends on the
exact extent of the lesion, preferably confirmed at
autopsy. If the "partial" loss were in fact area 17,
sparing 18, then loss of the right visual half field in the
speaking hemisphere, but not the left half field, is
consistent with mental duality. (The Harrington illus-
tration they refer to, Figure 2 in the target article, does
not show a cortical lesion leading to loss of the right
visual half field, but rather destruction of the optic
radiation fibers on the left side, which of course has this
effect.)
The other bit of counterevidence supplied by Ander-
son & Gonsalves is equally dubious. Sensory suppres-
sion, where the best cases have parietal lesions and
hence may be subject to hemi-inattention, is highly
suspect; one would need much more evidence to
confirm the case against mental duality this way. (In
this context, Anderson and Gonsalves err when they
refer to the eye "contralateral to the brain damage"
THE BEHAVIORAL AND BRAIN SCIENCES (1981), 4 119
Response/Puccetti: Mental duality
being weakened; they must mean that the light source
contralateral to the brain damage is reported as weak-
er, for that light would strike the half retina of each eye
ipsilateral to the brain damage and go directly to the
speaking, left hemisphere. If that is correct, it suggests
that the lesions in question extend to the occipital
lobe.)
Although his point hardly amounts to experimental
counterevidence, Marks does also try to suggest a
serious difficulty for mental duality when he ponders
why, if the left hemisphere of the normal is not
involved in complex spatial tasks compared to the
right, it would not realize that it was not generating
these, on a par with the right hemisphere realizing it
was not generating complex language. There are really
two quite compatible answers to this. First, spatial
performances are in fact notoriously difficult to expli-
cate verbally: try describing a face to a stranger
compared to showing him a picture of it. Second, the
only time the left hemisphere is in a position to realize
the truth about this is when it is disconnected from the
right and suddenly finds its performance on, say,
non-Euclidean geometrical matching tasks with the
right hand falling to chance level while the left hand, if
not interfered with, performs at the preoperative and
normal level (Franco & Sperry 1977). But even then it
will not admit the obvious. The right hemisphere of the
normal, on the other hand, has no way of ascribing
complex verbal behavior to itself, since it understands
very little of what is being generated in speech or
writing and, unlike the left half brain executing a
spatial task with the preferred hand on the basis of
right-hemisphere cognitive input, is not providing
motor initiatives that lead to verbal output.
VII. Historical considerations. It is suggested by
Geschwind that the theory under consideration had
many other proponents between Wigan (1844) and
Bogen (1969). While I agree with Robinson that ques-
tions of priority are scarcely pivotal, I do not think that
any of the figures mentioned by Geschwind or Robin-
son explicitly advocated mental duality in the normal
vertebrate (including the human) brain. (Of Holland
[1840] I am unsure.) Rather, these pioneers were either
championing multiplicity in general, through observa-
tions of what Geschwind has made deservedly famous
as the "disconnection syndrome," or emphasizing the
potential for multiple personalities in psychogenic
disorders which have no known anatomic basis. Except
in the trivial sense that two is a multiple of one, mental
duality appears to have no explicit advocates other
than those I listed; and since Wigan is dead and Bogen
now seems beset by doubt, I may presently be its only
defender in the form expressed in the target article.
VIII. Terminological considerations. Testing for "ho-
rnonymous hemianopsia" with both eyes open, and for
"bitemporal hemianopsia" with each eye separately is
discussed by Bogen. LeDoux & Gazzaniga deny that
split-brain patients have a "bitemporal defect," saying
instead that they show a "hemifield defect" arising
from a loss of interhemispheric integration of the
representations of the left and right visual fields. But
120 THE BEHAVIORAL AND BRAIN SCIENCES (1981), 4
where is this "hemifield defect"? It is, they concede, in
the temporal quadrants of the visual field. And since,
when split-brain patients are tested with both eyes
open, the contents of the ipsilateral hemifield are seen
by neither hemisphere, this is clearly a double hemia-
nopia (or hemianopsia if you prefer that spelling) for
the temporal quadrants, hence a "bitemporal defect"
on a par with the eye-field loss of chiasmal patients. It
is true that "bitemporal defect" is not a term normally
applied to the split-brain subject's visual loss, but
neither (contra LeDoux & Gazzaniga) is it an embar-
rassment to the case for mental duality to do so. For the
fact is that textbooks on clinical perimetry have not yet
assimilated data on the split brain: Harrington (1976)
devotes less than two pages to this (pp. 380-81) and
then restricts himself to animal preparations.
IX. The special significance of chiasmal disruption
without callosal damage. It is stated by Eccles that he
finds no difficulty in accommodating the results of
visual testing of commissurotomized versus chiasmal
patients with the conventional view of the corpus
callosum as integrating consciousness between the cere-
bral hemispheres. LeDoux & Gazzaniga say that these
data are irrelevant to the issue of mental duality as
opposed to fusion, for they are simply and obviously
predictable from visual anatomy. Marks says that the
conventional theory predicts the same visual defect in
commissurotomy patients as mine does, and that it also
predicts the stated results of optic-chiasm disruption.
Back to the drawing boards. A disruption of the optic
chiasm ("2" in Figure 2 of the target article) deprives
the left hemisphere of direct visual input from the
right eye and the right hemisphere of direct visual
input from the left eye. If the left eye alone is tested,
using an Ishihara plate with the number 27 displayed
on it, it comes as no surprise that a right-handed
chiasmal patient with speech in the left hemisphere
will verbally report seeing a 7, since the (lightly
shaded) pathway from the left (or temporal) half retina
of the left eye gets visual information from the right
half of visual space where the 7 resides.
But now test the right eye alone. The patient reports
seeing a 2. Where did this 2 come from? Since the left
eye is closed, the only visual pathway between the
retinas of the eyes and the brain is the one that projects
from the right (or temporal) hemiretina of the right
eye (darkly shaded) to the right hemisphere's genicu-
late nucleus, and from there via the optic radiation to
the right primary visual cortex. As we have seen in the
target article, if this were a callosally sectioned human,
it would stay there and not be verbally reported,
though the patient might, if encouraged, point to the
number 2 with his left hand in an array of numbers
including 7 and 27. However, the chiasmal patient
with an intact corpus callosum including the splenium
unhesitatingly says he saw the number 2. Thus it
appears indubitable that the 2 registered consciously in
the left hemisphere as a consequence of being relayed
there from the right hemisphere.
The key question now becomes this one: did the
number 2 also register consciously in the right hemi-
sphere shortly before registering in the verbal, left

hemisphere?
Eccles used to hold the view that nothing registers
consciously in the minor hemisphere, but now he
allows for at least simple pictorial material. Davidson
says that the occurrence of complex cognitive process-
ing is insufficient evidence from which to infer the
presence of consciousness; and Margolis feels that what
is happening on each side of the corpus callosum is
information processing, which need not be separately
conscious. The ability of the mute hemisphere of the
split-brain patient to point to the number 2 with the
left hand may still, according to Von Eckardt, be
likened to the "perceptual" performance of automata
designed by artificial intelligence workers.
But then what are sceptics like the latter to make of
an adult right-hander who has undergone complete left
hemispherectomy? In the same testing situation he
could only see, if anything, the 2 in the Ishihara plate
displaying 27; for even with intact optic chiasm and
thus input to the brain from both eyes, visual represen-
tation is achieved only in the residual right hemisphere:
no question of interhemispheric fusion there! If he is
asked to signal the number he has seen, using the
fingers of his left hand, and he holds up two fingers,
was this the outcome of unconscious visual information
processing? If so, then such a patient must be an
organic automaton, even though he displays above-
normal nonverbal intelligence, good memory, and
well-preserved libido and affect (Smith 1966).
Thus my critics seem to face a genuine dilemma.
Either (a) they must grant that there is conscious
duplication of sensory effects in the brain without
subsequent fusion, which accounts both for the 2 being
verbally reported by the chiasmal patient when the
right eye alone is tested and for his reporting 27 with
both eyes open; or (b) they must accept the logical
implications of their denial and assert that, despite all
behavioral evidence to the contrary, the adult right-
handed hemispherectomy patient is an unconscious
automaton. I see no third alternative that would not be
unbelievably ad hoc, such as holding the hemispherec-
tomy patient to be conscious in all functions except
visual information processing, etc.
X. The role of novel facts in brain science. It now
seems widely recognized by philosophers and histori-
ans of science that what are called "novel facts" play a
crucial role - if experimentally corroborated - in
lending genuine, as opposed to merely spurious,
support to a theory. However, as Zahar (1973) has
brilliantly shown,1 if we equate novelty simply with
temporal novelty, such as the return of Halley's comet
anticipated by Newtonian physics, we end up with a
paradox. For on that restricted meaning of novelty
Galileo's experiments on free fall did not confirm
Newton's theory of gravitation, Michelson's experi-
ment did not confirm special relativity, and Einstein
gets no credit for explaining the anomalous precession
of Mercury's perihelion, because it had been recorded
centuries before he proposed general relativity.
To remedy this situation, Zahar (1973) proposed the
following redefinition of novel fact:
Response/Puccetti: Mental duality
A fact ivill be considered novel with respect to a
given hypothesis if it did not belong to the problem-
situation which governed the construction of the
hypothesis, (p. 103; Zahar's italics)
The advantage of this redefinition of novel fact is then
explained by Zahar (1973) as follows:
Consider two consecutive theories X, and T2 in the
same research programme; suppose that Tt faces two
anomalies e, and e2 and that T2 was specifically
evolved in order to account for e,; if it is then found
that T2 also explains e2, e2, in contradistinction to eh
will be taken to provide evidential support for T2.
This proposal rests on the fact that ingenious and
imaginative scientists can always construct theories
which account for a finite number of known facts, (p.
103)
Applying this observation now to Einstein's publica-
tion in 1915 of a paper that explained the precession of
the perihelion of Mercury, Zahar (1973) says:
This explanation of a well-known fact was
tremendously important for the following reasons:
the predicted fact is completely novel in the sense
that I have explained; that is Einstein did not use the
known behavior of Mercury's perihelion in
constructing his theory. In fact this empirical
prediction is all the more dramatic because it Hows
from a hypothesis which is so speculative, so
"metaphysical," that one may wonder whether it
belongs to physics or to pure mathematics. Thus,
through explaining the "anomalous" motion of
Mercury's perihelion, Relativity Theory superseded
its rivals from a strictly empirical point of view. (pp.
256-57; Zahar's italics)
If we move now from "hard" sciences like mathe-
matical physics and astronomy to the empirically "soft-
er" brain sciences, I am suggesting that, with due
caution for our greater proneness to observational
error, the inability to detect a bitemporal deficit in
chiasmal patients with both eyes open, as contrasted
with the demonstration of this in split-brain patients,
also provides an example of a "novel fact" lending
genuine evidential support to the hypothesis of mental
duality in the normal vertebrate brain.2
Does the theory also predict any temporally novel
facts? Yes, it does, but in the intervening four years
(Puccetti 1977) no one, to my knowledge, has used
already existing techniques and equipment to test it -
an example of the deadening effect of consensus on
possible progress in brain science.
But in a curious way this does not much matter.
Assuming that the "bitemporal defects" argument
continues to successfully withstand critical analysis,
and assuming that no one comes along with a simpler
account of the same facts that is of equal or greater
explanatory power, then mental duality will be off to a
good start. For, as Zahar (1973) remarks, temporal
novelty in a research program is a sufficient but not a
necessary condition for novelty:
A temporally new fact may have greater
psychological impact than some known fact, but this,
on its own, is irrelevant to the objective empirical
support which it lends to a hypothesis, (p. 103;
Zahar's italics)
THE BEHAVIORAL AND BRAIN SCIENCES (1981), 4 121
References/Puccetti: Mental duality
NOTES
1. I am warmly indebted to Professor James R. Brown,
Department of Philosophy, University of Western Ontario,
for bringing Zahar's work to rny attention and for showing me
how it might be applied to my interpretation of bitemporal
defects.
2. I wish to apologize most humbly for making - in the
target article and again in this reply to my critics - outlandish
comparisons between myself and such figures as Galileo,
Pasteur, and Einstein. Those who know me well personally
are aware that I certainly have no exaggerated opinion of
myself. It is just that when seeking analogous issues in the
history of science, one calls to mind most easily the great
figures of the past.
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Development and Evolution of
Brain Size
Behavioral Implications
edited by Martin E. Hahn, Craig Jensen and Bruce Dudek
1980, 416pp., £21.00 (UK only) /$37.50, 0.12.314650.X

What is the relationship between brain size and behavioural complexity? What are the effects of
genetic selection for brain size on brain substructures and behaviour? Do genetic and
environmental manipulations of brain size have similar consequences? Development and
Evolution of Brain Size examines these questions, placing them in the perspective of the brain-
behaviour relationship in general. Investigators in the areas of evolutionary theory, anthropology,
the neurosciences, psychology, and behaviour genetics examine such variables as evolution and
development, relating them to resultant behavioural changes.

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