Self-Consciousness and "Split" Brains

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Schechter
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Corpus Callosum ◽  
Human Brain ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Other ◽  
Cerebral Hemispheres ◽  
Experimental Conditions ◽  
Fiber Tract ◽  
Split Brain

The largest fiber tract in the human brain is the corpus callosum, which connects the two cerebral hemispheres. A number of surgeries severing this structure were performed on adults in the United States in the second half of the twentieth century. After they are surgically separated from each other in this way, a “split-brain” subject’s hemispheres begin to operate unusually independently of each other in the realms of perception, cognition, and the control of action—almost as if each had a mind of its own. But can a mere hemisphere really see? Speak? Feel? Know what it has done? The split-brain cases raise questions of psychological identity: How many subjects of experience are there within a split-brain subject? How many persons? How many minds? Under experimental conditions, split-brain subjects often act as though they were animated by two distinct conscious beings, evoking the duality intuition. On the other hand, a split-brain subject seems like one of us—not like two of us sharing one body. Split-brain subjects thus also evoke the unity intuition.This book is devoted to reconciling these two apparently opposing intuitions. The key to doing so are facts about the way self-consciousness operates in split-brain subjects. A split-brain subject is composed of two conscious psychological beings that fail to recognize each other’s existence and indeed cannot distinguish themselves from each other. Instead, each must first-personally identify with the split-brain subject as a whole, and in so doing, the two make themselves into one person.

Teaching National Identity and Alterity

2018 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 106-126
Author(s):  
Bahar Gürsel
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
National Identity ◽  
Primary Schools ◽  
The United States ◽  
American Identity ◽  
The Other ◽  
Nineteenth Century America ◽  
Race Ethnicity

The swift and profound transformations in technology and industry that the United States began to experience in the late 1800s manifested themselves in school textbooks, which presented different patterns of race, ethnicity, and otherness. They also displayed concepts like national identity, exceptionalism, and the superiority of Euro-American civilization. This article aims to demonstrate, via an analysis of two textbooks, how world geography was taught to children in primary schools in nineteenth century America. It shows that the development of American identity coincided with the emergence of the realm of the “other,” that is, with the intensification of racial attitudes and prejudices, some of which were to persist well into the twentieth century.

THE INTELLECTUAL MIGRATION AND THE “OTHER WEIMAR”

2015 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 597-606
Author(s):  
NOAH B. STROTE
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Other ◽  
Left Wing ◽  
Weimar Germany ◽  
Jewish Heritage ◽  
The Us ◽  
History Of

These two books bring fresh eyes and much-needed energy to the study of the intellectual migration from Weimar Germany to the United States. Research on the scholars, writers, and artists forced to flee Europe because of their Jewish heritage or left-wing politics was once a cottage industry, but interest in this topic has waned in recent years. During the height of fascination with the émigrés, bookstores brimmed with panoramic works such as H. Stuart Hughes's The Sea Change: The Migration of Social Thought, 1930–1965 (1975), Lewis Coser's Refugee Scholars in America: Their Impact and Their Experiences (1984), and Martin Jay's Permanent Exiles: Essays on the Intellectual Migration from Germany to America (1985). Now, while historians still write monographs about émigré intellectuals, their focus is often narrowed to biographies of individual thinkers. Refreshingly, with Emily Levine's and Udi Greenberg's new publications we are asked to step back and recapture a broader view of their legacy. The displacement of a significant part of Germany's renowned intelligentsia to the US in the mid-twentieth century remains one of the major events in the intellectual history of both countries.

Alexis de Tocqueville: At the Crossroads of History

1999 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
pp. 177-190
Author(s):  
Daniel Bell
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Other ◽  
Alexis De Tocqueville ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Future

In the nineteenth and down into the twentieth century, France and the United States offered two contrasting images to each other, one of the past, the other of the future. Both considered themselves as exceptional societies. But the term exceptional differed in the two countries. Exceptional, in France, meant uncommon, a civilization uniquely marked by its culture. Exceptional, for the United States, meant a fate different from the historical course of degeneration of other nations.

The Back End of the Probe

Runaway ◽  
2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anthony Chaney
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Turning Point ◽  
The United States ◽  
Public Intellectual ◽  
The Other ◽  
Ecological Consciousness ◽  
Gregory Bateson ◽  
Ecology Of Mind ◽  
Dialectics Of Liberation

In this chapter, Allen Ginsberg's reaction to Gregory Bateson and the greenhouse effect is revisited and amplified as an instance of apocalyptic encounter, a central experience of the ecological consciousness and the prospect of ecocatastrophe. That amplification includes the creation of his much-anthologized poem, "Wales Visitation." The trajectory of Bateson's career as a scientist, writer, and public intellectual after 1967 is sketched. This includes a well-documented conference he facilitated in 1968 and the publication of Steps to an Ecology of Mind in 1972. The year following the events described in this book--1968--is widely recognized as a turning point toward increasing violence and backlash, and the rapid collapse of the liberal consensus that had seen the United States through the most turbulent years of the twentieth century. The epilogue invites the reader to regard that turning point in terms of the emergent ecological consciousness the book has placed in context. The epilogue, too, leaves Bateson at a turning point. In contrast to the other principle figures at the Congress on the Dialectics of Liberation, whose public influence peaked in 1967, Bateson's time as a public intellectual had just begun.

Masters of (Our) Education: Applied Anthropology in the Non-Applied Program

1997 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
pp. 13-16
Author(s):  
Eric Chambers
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Human Brain ◽  
The United States ◽  
Applied Anthropology ◽  
The Other ◽  
National Forest ◽  
The Sun ◽  
Applied Program ◽  
A Site ◽  
Central Arizona

The night pushes the sun down to the desert floor setting the horizon ablaze with washes or yellow, red, and orange. The smoke from our campfire stings our eyes while the flames make grotesque shadows of the cactus that circle our camp. Fifteen miles to the south we just barely make out the lights of the only tavern in the small town of Punkin Center in the Tonto National Forest, in central Arizona. Lee, a Navajo archaeologist and friend, passes me a bottle of Mad Dog in exchange for a cheap cigar left over from a friend's recent celebration of paternity. We sit in silence for several minutes before I finally ask Lee what he thought of a site we had "discovered" earlier in the day during a random transect of one of the United States Geographical Survey (USGS) sections of the Tonto National Forest quadrangle. The site, christened "Cerebral Pueblo" by one of the other archaeologists on our team who felt that the vein-like undulations of the vascular basalt used to construct the walls reminded him of the appearance of a human brain, was a small, fifty to seventy room community set atop a small hill, well away from nearby roads.

The Intimate Violence of Political and Economic Change in Southern Ethiopia

2012 ◽  
Vol 54 (1) ◽  
pp. 35-64 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Ellison
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Muslim Women ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Other ◽  
Eastern Africa ◽  
Southern Ethiopia ◽  
Intimate Violence ◽  
Women's Lives ◽  
Genital Cutting

In 1960, women in southern Ethiopia's rural Konso district faced a violent campaign by local men to eradicate leather clothing following a ban imposed by the local governor, Tesfaye Hailu. Tesfaye, a man of the northern Amhara ethnic group, banned leather clothes along with bead necklaces and arm bracelets as part of imperial Ethiopia's “modernization,” which was influenced by disparate sources, including the United States. Tesfaye saw women's attire as “backward” and “unhygienic” and as obstructing modernization; its elimination was a means to improve Konso culture and help the empire join the community of modern nations. The “culture” of “the Other” has often been cast as impeding “modernity” and requiring elimination or change, particularly the practices of women, from genital cutting in eastern Africa to veiling among Muslim women in the Middle East and Europe (Hodgson 2009; Masquelier 2005; Merry 2009a). So it was with the widespread, politicized transition to cotton clothing in nineteenth- and twentieth-century eastern Africa. The target was clothing worn by all women in Konso and made by women in the low-status category of “Xauta,” sometimes referred to as a “caste.” Leather skirts signaled important stages in women's lives, and became extensions of individual women's tastes, experiences, and identities. Women today recall the violence and punishments of the campaign, including being chased, beaten, imprisoned, and fined, and even having their skirts forcibly removed at home and in public. They offer contradictory explanations of who initiated the ban and the reasons for it, but they remember clearly the local men involved in eradication efforts.

From the other shore: American political science and the ‘Italian case’

Modern Italy ◽  
2009 ◽  
Vol 14 (3) ◽  
pp. 311-337 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alfio Mastropaolo
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Political Science ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Other ◽  
The Political ◽  
Italian Case ◽  
American Political Science

This article examines a number of the major works on Italy conducted by political scientists from the United States in the second half of the twentieth century. Focusing on the research of Banfield, Almond and Verba, Tarrow and Putnam, it discusses the interpretations of Italy offered by these scholars and examines the contribution they have made to the political and intellectual debate surrounding the so-called ‘Italian case’. It concludes that the image presented of Italy by American researchers is generally critical and often simplified and stereotypical. Moreover, rather than highlighting the clichés frequently present in such accounts, Italian intellectuals have tended instead to use them in order to construct a wholly negative perspective of Italy and, in many instances, have distorted the original intentions of those American political scientists whose work is cited as evidence.

Brain Disconnection and Schizophrenia

1973 ◽  
Vol 123 (577) ◽  
pp. 661-662 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. G. Beaumont ◽  
S. J. Dimond
Keyword(s):  
Corpus Callosum ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Other ◽  
Cerebral Hemispheres ◽  
Split Brain ◽  
Cross Match ◽  
As If

The concept of brain disconnection derives from work in which the two cerebral hemispheres are surgically separated by division of the corpus callosum. The patient behaves as if his two half-brains function to some degree independently. The syndrome of brain disconnection is exemplified by such split-brain cases (Geschwind, 1965). Neither hemisphere shows an awareness of the functions of the other, and there is a marked failure to cross-match stimuli across the midline of the body. The integrity of the corpus callosum is essential to normal integration between the hemispheres.

History and the Businessman

1956 ◽  
Vol 30 (3) ◽  
pp. 241-259 ◽  
Author(s):  
W. Woodruf
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
General Theory ◽  
The United States ◽  
Human Experience ◽  
The Other ◽  
Focused Attention ◽  
Modern Times ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
Robber Baron

The distinguishing aspect of business in modern times, particularly in the United States, is that it has permeated the entire fabric of civilization. Historical interpretations of this circumstance have been in sharp conflict and have tended toward extremes. The wave of national self-criticism of the early twentieth century focused attention on the shortcomings of business, ignoring its constructive aspects. On the other hand, the modern revisionist school of historians, depicting the businessman not as a “robber baron” but as an “architect of material greatness,” has been prone to stress ends ahead of means and to overlook the deeper implications of the businessman's role in society as a whole. True perspective is not afforded by either of these opposing academic positions, nor is it likely to be gained by further blind amassing of facts-in-isolation on the part of business historians. A general theory of business evolution is needed — one that neither praises nor blames the businessman but seeks to locate him in the larger context of human experience.

The “Historical Turn” in the Social Sciences

2017 ◽  
Vol 48 (3) ◽  
pp. 295-312 ◽  
Author(s):  
Herbert S. Klein
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
United States ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
The United States ◽  
Historical Research ◽  
The Other ◽  
The Past ◽  
Professional Societies ◽  
Historical Turn ◽  
The Social

The first professional societies in the United States, from the 1880s to the 1910s, understood history to be closely associated with the other social sciences. Even in the mid-twentieth century, history was still grouped with the other social sciences, along with economics, sociology, political science, and anthropology. But in the past few decades, history and anthropology in the United States (though not necessarily in other countries) have moved away from the social sciences to ally themselves with the humanities—paradoxically, just when the other social sciences are becoming more committed to historical research.

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