Telling This Story of Life Itself

A corpus callosotomy is a surgical procedure by which the bundle of nerves that connect the two halves of a human brain are cut, leaving them without the ability to communicate with one another. It's a rare procedure, most often undertaken as a high-risk, last-ditch effort to mitigate seizures, most often due to drug-resistant epilepsy.

Patients who have undergone this surgery tend to appear and behave normally in day-to-day life, but in reality their divided brain behaves as two separate brains in one body, with distinct personalities, perceptions, and purposes. One hand might be buttoning a shirt while the other is unbuttoning it (i.e., alien hand syndrome). The person(s) might perceive an object in their left visual field (which is processed by the right hemisphere), but be unable to speak about it or name it because speech processed in the left hemisphere. Indeed, these two minds within one body are often completely unaware of one another, often with distinct personalities. In one patient it was found that the left hemisphere personality believed in God, while the right was an athiest. 

The left hemisphere unconsciously creates "stories" to explain the actions of the right hemisphere. If the right personality is commanded to walk, the left personality will concoct an explanation for why their shared body is walking -- "I'm getting a glass of water." In other words, a divided brain results not in two halves of one mind, but rather two distinct minds. In this regard, minds cannot be reduced or halved because a mind will always be complete unto itself. This is due in large measure to our minds' capacity for telling stories about themselves.

This phenomenon isn't the exclusive domain of callosotomy patients. We all do it. Cognitive psychologist Stephen Pinker refers to our left hemisphere as a "baloney generator" due to its tendency to concoct plausible-seeming justifications for behaviors and decisions made by other parts of the brain, even when those explanations are entirely made up. Neuroscientists tell us that more often than not we act first, then our minds come up with the story of why we acted after the fact. We are so adept at this kind of storytelling, however, that we genuinely believe it happened the other way around.

Storytelling (or baloney generation) is fundamental to human cognition. We do it every time we open our eyes. There is literally a blind spot in our field of visions where our noses are, yet we don't notice it because our minds tell a story that convinces us that we are seeing a continuous world in front of us. It doesn't seem like baloney, however, because we do it seamlessly and, more often than not, it serves us.

The point is that none of this happens on a conscious level. Indeed, very little of what our brains actually do involves our awareness. This includes thinking. Our conscious mind is very good at say, identifying a problem or challenge. It's called "executive function" because back in the 70's scientists thought our pre-frontal cortex operated like the brain's CEO, managing, directing, and planning. Then, like any good leader, it delegates the details to the rest of the brain so that it can continue to focus on the tasks at hand, which is dealing with the present, short term (or working) memory, and impulse control. The problem is that the more we learn, the weaker the CEO metaphor becomes. Increasingly, we're coming to understand that brains are not so much hierarchical as they are cooperative, so when I think of our conscious minds I'm more inclined to see them as gatekeepers tasked with determining what should be allowed in or kept out.

This is why our best ideas come to us in the shower or while taking a walk or cooking dinner or doing anything other than consciously thinking about the problem. Our unconscious minds weave stories around the problem, a tapestry of metaphors, environmental and language triggers, physical sensations, dreams, and long term memory. It's a meandering process with lots of dead ends, detours, and spirals until a story finally emerges that makes our prefrontal cortex say, Eureka! 

Standard schooling, however, focuses almost exclusively on our conscious mind. It makes the ignorant assumption that all our thinking happens in a linear, knowable, provable way. Increasingly, our schools minimize those opportunities for the rest of the brain to get to work, treating things like the music, art, dance, socializing, and recess like interruptions to learning, when, in fact they are exactly what makes learning, deep learning, real learning, possible. So we're stuck with institutions in which children are fed isolated facts to hold in their short-term memory just long enough to pass the test. The rest of their minds, the part that makes sense of things, are almost entirely left out of the process. This situation is made even more dire by proliferation of screens in which "learning" is reduced to children hunched over tablets, their isolated faces illuminated like blue-grey ghosts.

Our minds function best while engaging life itself. Our minds function best when free to wander, to explore, to make and break connections, to physically engage, to discover plot, character, and happy endings that make narrative order of what our conscious minds have let in. Life itself presents real problems and challenges. Life itself is the project in which our minds are meant to be engaged. Life itself is the story we tell ourselves about ourselves and the world around us. Life itself is always a journey, an epic tale told in chapters and episodes and stanzas, one that carries us both outward and inward with no other goal than to discover and react to what happens next.

Play is what we have evolved for this purpose. When we are playing, we create just the right conditions for our full brains to engage in the process of telling this story of life itself. 

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Even the most thriving play-based environments can grow stale at times. I've created this collection of my favorite free (or nearly free) resources for educators, parents, and others who work with young children. It's my gift to you! Click here to download your own copy and never run out of ideas again!

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