The Man with Two Brains

In the movie The Man With Two Brains, Steve Martin’s character doesn’t literally have two brains. Instead, he’s a neurosurgeon who attends a conference in Vienna, Austria. He meets a mad scientist type who has figured out how to keep a human brain alive outside of the body, and he has a bunch of these brains in jars.

Naturally, Steve Martin’s character falls in love with one of those brains. It’s a play on words, and it’s very 80s.

That’s not really two brains inside a person’s head, but what if I told you that human heads are actually like that? What if I told you that you’ve got two brains inside your skull right now?

This is a bit of a stretch, but bear with me.

You probably know that the left and right hemispheres of your brain perform different types of functions. Maybe you’re artistically inclined and someone called you right-brained. This idea—that the right half of your brain is responsible for artistic intuition—came about from a particular experiment during the 1960s.

In this study, scientists had the opportunity to observe patients who had their corpus callosum surgically removed to treat their epilepsy. This thick bundle of nerves was a lot like that first undersea cable connecting North America and Europe, like an information bridge connecting both sides.

Suddenly, the two sides had become disconnected. One side had no idea what was going on over in the other side.

One creepy example of this manifesting: in some cases, your right hand can button a shirt while your left hand unbuttons the same shirt, with neither side having any idea that the other is doing this task. If you’ve ever heard about how the left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing—well, there can be some truth to the saying.

Now, it’s a bit of a myth to suggest that each side of the brain is wholly responsible for particular tasks. If you lose a part of your brain that typically performs something, you can often learn how to do it by reassigning another part of your brain to do that task.

So, there really are two separate regions in there, and they mainly communicate through the corpus callosum. I am the man with two brains.

Except: it gets even weirder. That idea that the two hemispheres are connected with that powerful undersea cable applies to more than just two regions in the brain. In fact, you’ve got a lot of these little independent minds, all working together in a decentralized, specialized network.

These parts communicate all the time, but they’re off on their own like commanders in a modern military. In a real sense, you don’t have two brains inside your skull, but more like dozens.