This is one part of a two-part video on the existence of the soul.
At the end of this video, make sure to check out the other bit.
In the 17th century, the philosopher Rene Descartes posited a distinct difference between
our physical bodies, on the one side, and our minds/spirit on the other - mind-body
dualism.
But the notion of a soul or spirit that inhabits our bodies and lives on after we die is nothing
new – and is possibly as old as religion itself.
Before the advent of neuroscience, various functions that we now know are performed by
the brain were attributed to the soul.
THE soul.
Just one.
One soul for one person.
Simple.
Easy.
But problematic.
Krista and Tatiana Hogan are conjoined twins - joined at the head.
Their brains are joined by a thalamic bridge allowing them to control each others’ limbs...
Whatcha doing Krista?
Making her leg move.
Feel each others’ sensations
I’m going to touch somewhere on sissy, and you’ve gotta tell me where it is. Ok?
Her cheek!
Yep.
Her... ear.
and see out of each others’ eyes.
When the twins were seven months, doctors observed that both girls brains processed
light signals even when one sister had her eyes covered.
It was almost like visual information was going from one set of eyes to both twins.
And we were able to record some evidence of that using visual evoked potentials
actually quite early on in life.
And we've since repeated that.
Doctors suspect that visual input travels from one girls retina along her optic nerve
and then splits into two courses.
One takes the usual pathway to her visual cortex.
The other crosses the thalamic bridge to her sisters thalamus and then visual cortex.
Tati, can you tell me what color this is?
Pink.
I have nothing but respect for these adorable children, but cases like this underline the
absurdity of the notion of the soul.
What if one believes in Allah and the other in Yahweh?
Where do they go when they die.
And who gets what parts of their shared mind?
Are the parts they share copied and pasted to their respective souls in heaven and hell?
Now imagine two grown men Hank and Harry having the same condition.
Harry commandeers Hank's phone and surfs the internet for Twinkies and stumbles across
the wrong website.
He stares through his brother's eyes at the salty display of floppy-noodle fun-time - and
enjoys it.
Which one of the twins now needs redemption for their sinful lusty ways?
Take a similar example: Prince and Love Zalte were conjoined twins joined at the stomach.
Unbeknownst to most, your enteric nervous system of your digestive tract is actually
referred to as your second brain.
90% or more of the body’s serotonin actually lies in the gut, not in your head.
And about half of the body’s dopamine lies in the gut.
And this is actually now the subject of studies trying to link what’s happening in the gut
and what’s happening in our head.
Now, it’s not conscious, but this “brain in your gut” communicates with but also
independent from your brain.
It’s affected by diet and can influence your mood and mental health.
If Prince gorges on carb-heavy food making his twin feel lethargic.
Is his brother’s soul guilty of being a lazy slothful sluggard?
Or if Prince is straight edge, but his brother, Love, is a drug addict, do the mind-altering
chemicals ingested by Love effect the soul of his twin?
While these cases alone throw a wrench in the soul hypothesis, they are rare and extreme
cases.
Surely you have only one independent soul, right?
If it only it was that simple!
In an attempt to treat seizures in the 1960’s, doctors would sometimes sever a patient’s
corpus callosum - the region of the brain that allows your left and right hemispheres
to communicate with each other.
After surgery, everything seemed normal with these patients... at first.
Until the left and right brains began disagreeing with each other.
See, the left half of your brain controls your right arm and your brain’s right hemisphere
controls your left arm.
When out grocery shopping the two brain halves would disagree over what should and shouldn’t
go in the cart.
Split brain patients getting dressed in the morning would grab an outfit with one hand
only to find their other disagreeing and swatting it down.
In one case, the left arm of a split brain patient grabbed and violently shook his wife
- to the complete horror of his other hemisphere which grabbed and fought off his other hand
in defense of his wife.
Intrigued, scientists devised experiments and found that only one hemisphere was responsible
for verbal communication, but the other could communicate by drawing.
The anatomy of the human visual system allows so that when a person fixates on a central
point, what one sees to the left of that point is projected to the right hemisphere, and
what one sees to the right of that point is projected into the left hemisphere.
Now when a word or picture falls to the left of a fixation point, that information goes
to his disconnected right half-brain.
And as we can see here, Joe’s unable to name it.
Joe is able to draw the picture with his left hand - the left hand getting its major control
from the right-half brain.
What’d you draw?
A car.
What’d you see?
A wheel.
On one side, I don’t know what I saw on the other.
What’d you draw that for?
I don’t know.
So, even though he can’t name it, his left hand is able to draw out the picture of the
stimulus of the picture or word that we presented to his right half-brain.
When flashing different words to the different hemispheres, the left brain would visually
process the image in its field of view and blurt out one word.
But the right brain would disagree with it and draw a picture of what it saw.
Scientists found that the two hemispheres had different personalities and different
preferences (like favorite colors).
They even specialized in different tasks.
One hemisphere, able to solve spatial problems would try to help/fight with the other when
working on a task that required spatial reasoning.
Well, we’re now seeing that the left hand can perform the problem, and that the right
hand cannot.
Now the question becomes, what happens when you allow both hands together to try to solve
the problem?
And what we find out is that they fight over each other.
One hand knows how to do it, and one hand does not, and so they more or less squabble.
And the reason for this is that the hemisphere’s are disconnected.
The right hemisphere controls the left hand, and the left hemisphere controls the right
hand.
And these are almost mutually independent systems.
It was as if two people were fighting over performing this task - one knew how and one
didn’t.
And one would fight for dominance of the situation.
And all of this isn’t just in split brain patients.
We all have two independent personalities and identities with two separate input and
output sources existing in all of our brains - albeit, usually in complete synchrony and
harmony (giving the illusion of one self).
Does this mean we have two souls or one soul with two independent halves?
And at death, are the two personalities/identities of split-brain patients merged back to one
in an angelic post-mortem soul-reunification procedure?
What happens when one hemisphere is a theist and the other an atheist?
That’s not a hypothetical; it actually happened.
Now comes the big question?
What if you ask, “Do you believe in God?”
So I asked, do you believe in God.
The right hemisphere went straight to yes.
I asked the same question to the left hemisphere - yes, no, I don’t know - it went to “no.”
So here’s a human being who’s right hemisphere’s an atheist, and left hemisphere, on the other
hand believes in God.
And this finding should have sent a tsunami through the theological community, but barely
produced a ripple, because it raises all kinds of profound theological questions.
A completely separate phenomenon from split brain patients is dissociative identity disorder
(formerly multiple personality disorder), in which one person embodies multiple identities
with different beliefs, hopes, desires, and personalities.
How many souls does that person have?
And can the religious efforts of one identity save all of them - even if the others all
follow different religions?
Finally, how do souls form?
If ensoulment in the human body occurs at conception, what happens to that soul when
the zygote splits and develops into two embryos?
Is the soul divided and each get half or multiplied into two?
And what about when one zygote cannibalizes its twin in-utero?
This can and does occur in some intersex cases and can result in one person having the genitals
of both sexes.
In the animal kingdom, this is called a chimera.
Do these people possess two souls in one body or one super-soul?
How bad ass would that be!
Bask in my power ye mighty and despair, for I am Thomas Westbrook - eater of souls!
When someone dies, it seems like something left them.
Like a puppet master dropping the strings.
But intuition is often wrong.
Just because something feels intuitively right doesn’t mean it is.
And whether it’s split brain patients, conjoined twins, dissociative identity disorder, or
the idea of ensoulment in the womb, those positing the notion of the soul have some
hard questions to answer.
And even if you’re able to answer them consistently, answers lacking evidence - are nothing more
than blind speculation.
Don’t forget to check out my other video on the existence of souls where I ask even
more hard questions that hopefully are new fuel for thought.
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You freaking rock.
And as always, dare to be curious but don’t drink the Koolaid!