[WT Sharpe]

I've lone been interested in split brain patients, those unfortunate few who have, for whatever reason (frequently severe epilepsy uncontrollable by less severe means) had their corpus callosum severed, thus breaking the means of communication between the two halves of the brain.

For example, the neurologist V. S. Ramanchandran describes one split-brain patient who, when asked if he was a believer or not, said he was an atheist, but his right brain declared he was a believer. Apparently, it is possible to have two opposing religious beliefs residing in the same brain. Ramachandran continues: “If that person dies, what happens? Does one hemisphere go to heaven and the other go to hell? I don’t know the answer to that.”

Here is a theological conundrum for the ages: what would religious groups say about this man's eternal fate? And if the two brains can hold such discordant opinions, what if one is a Republican and the other a Democrat? Should both sides be allowed to vote? What if one side is an upstanding, law-abiding citizen but the other side a murdering criminal? Is it fair that one side be punished for the crimes of the other?

Unknown to the dominant left brain, the right brain secretly had a completely different agenda for the future. The right brain literally had a mind of its own. Rita Carter writes, “The possible implications of this are mind-boggling. It suggests that we might all be carrying around in our skulls a mute prisoner with a personality, ambition, and self-awareness quite different from the day-to-day entity we believe ourselves to be.”