Everyone bullshits
Humans are funny creatures.
When you ask someone why they performed a certain action, generally they can self-reflect and articulate a valid answer you might believe. But is that truly the reason?
Don’t believe it
Split brain patients were people who suffered from severe epileptic seizures and had to get brain surgery to cure it. The procedure works beautifully, except for the side-effect of severing the corpus callosum, the middle strip of the the brain that connects the left and right hemispheres.
Why does this matter?
Each hemisphere of your brain serves a different purpose. The left side thinks in logic and language while the right side in feelings and visuals.
Each side of your brain also controls one side of your body. So for instance, your left eye (controlled by the right side of your body, the “holistic” brain) sees a sentence, it cannot understand it because language exists on the other hemisphere.
Normally, when you read a sentence, it is first parsed by the left hemisphere then communicated to the right hemisphere via the corpus callosum. This happens almost instantaneously.
So, as I mentioned before, split brain patients had an operation that severed the corpus callosum, the conduit between each hemisphere. They retained all normal mental abilities and are able to function a normal life, except their left and right brains cannot communicate with each other.
This means that when they see a object with the left eye, it is processed only by the right side of the brain, which does not have language. Experiments show these split brain patients cannot describe in words pictures that they are shown only to the left eye.
This is where it gets interesting.
Patients were shown 2 pictures, each exclusively to one eye. The left eye (processed by the “holistic” brain) saw a snow scene, and the right eye (processed by the “logical” brain) saw chicken foot. They were then shown pictures visible to both eyes, and asked to choose ones that were related. Patients choose a shovel and chicken, corresponding correctly to the snow scene and chicken foot.
They were then were asked why they choose these related pictures.
Patients correctly described the chicken, saying that it was related to the chicken foot. But they couldn't correctly articulate why they choose the shovel, because there is no language on the brain’s right hemisphere.
Instead, they made up a story: they said the shovel is used to clean the chicken heap (or some variation of that). Of course, we know they chose it because of the snow scene — people just didn’t have the words for it, literally.
The lesson
Remember that we are not logical creatures, that the emotional and instinctive brain came long before our neo-cortex became prominent. Our line of thoughts goes:
Stimuli -> Emotion -> Action -> Logic
We often do things, THEN rationalize why.
In other words, everyone BS’s… even to ourselves.
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