Alex O'Connor
speaker
2,073 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Sep 2025
last heard 25 May
Alex O'Connor’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 1.
Appearances
There used to be this treatment for extreme cases of epilepsy called a corpus callosotomy, which is where the connection is severed.
Epilepsy is like an electrical storm in the brain.
And so one way to try to minimize it was literally just to cut the two hemispheres at the connective tissue.
And so people who've had this operation done were known as split brain patients because the hemispheres have been disconnected.
They can still communicate slightly through other means, but their main source of communication is inhibited.
If you met one of these people, you wouldn't know.
They're just perfectly normal.
They'll speak to you like I'm speaking to you now.
Everything's totally fine.
But in experimental conditions, you can prove some really weird things.
For example, speech and language of communication is broadly speaking governed by the front left part of your brain, left hemisphere.
Remember, the left hemisphere controls like the right hand side of your body and the right hemisphere controls the left hand side of your body.
So with humans, because our eyes are on the front, our right visual field goes to the left brain and our left visual field goes to the right brain.
So in a split brain patient, they look at a screen.
You can watch this experiment on YouTube, by the way.
They're looking at a screen and on the right hand side of the screen, it will flash a word.
So it goes to their left hemisphere and it will say umbrella and they'll say umbrella, car, car, chair, chair.
Then they'll flash a word on the left-hand side of the screen, so just the right hemisphere.
And it will say, cowboy hat.
And they'll say, I didn't see anything.
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