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gjm comments on Open Thread May 9 - May 15 2016 - Less Wrong Discussion

3 Post author: Elo 09 May 2016 01:55AM

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Comment author: ChristianKl 19 May 2016 02:50:42PM 0 points [-]

For example in vision, each hemisphere gets half of input from each eye.

Where did you get that idea? A quick googling gives me http://changingminds.org/explanations/brain/parts_brain/left_right_brain.htm:

The halves are neither mirror images nor contain completely exclusive functions. However there are significant similarities. Each half receive sensory information though, curiously, from the opposite side of the body. Thus the right eye goes to the left brain and vice versa. The exception is the nose: the right nostril goes to the right brain.

Skeptics question : http://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/32988/does-the-right-eye-feed-information-to-the-left-brain-hemisphere-while-the-left

Comment author: gjm 19 May 2016 03:10:16PM -1 points [-]

If you look e.g. at the start of the Wikipedia article on the visual cortex you will find:

the left hemisphere visual cortex receives signals from the right visual field, and the right visual cortex from the left visual field.

Or take a look at this diagram from a book about the visual field. Or this online book.

I thought this was very widely known -- which I say not in order to make you feel bad (there's no shame in not knowing things) but to suggest why Viliam didn't find it necessary to provide references when he said that each hemisphere gets input from both eyes' view of one half of the visual field.

Comment author: ChristianKl 19 May 2016 03:37:11PM 0 points [-]

Or take a look at this diagram from a book about the visual field. Or this online book.

Thanks.

but to suggest why Viliam didn't find it necessary to provide references when he said that each hemisphere gets input from both eyes' view of one half of the visual field.

I don't ask for reference to claim that it was wrong for Viliam that he didn't provide references. I rather ask because the belief I had in my mind conflict. Likely because sources like the ChangingMinds website making a wrong claim (if I take your link to be trustworthy).

But if it's the visual field that's link that doesn't raise my basic confidence in the claim that hypnosis focuses on a single hemisphere. Timeline therapy would be a good example. Some people orient their timeline in a way that if you ask them to visualize an event that happend in the past it will be on the left side and if you ask them to imagine an event of the future it will be on the right side.

Different people have a different spatial layout for this but it generally doesn't happen that someone visualize both his past and future in the same direction. Generally entities accessed by hypnosis do have a location and there are effects of moving that location around but they are not all located to one side, and if I would meet a person for whom everything is on one side I would hypnotize that the person has a pathology.

I'm personally wary of drawing strong conclusions about underlying neuroscience when thinking about hypnosis, particularly because I'm exposed to hypnotists talking about neuroscience who might have access to empiric experience of what hypnosis does but who don't have real neurosicence knowledge.

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