You need a spade to clean the coop

Boy, I know why politicians say so many silliness.

I´m finishing Harari´s book —Homo Deus— and the third section in it is really brilliant. The paragraphs grab your attention  and you go through its pages without realizing how time flies.

On page 321, Mr Harari remember us that we have two brains, or rather, that our brain has two hemispheres: the right hemisphere and the left hemisphere. Both of them need to help each other, but apiece of them is specialist in one particular field. So, the left hemisphere is in charge of language while the right hemisphere is in charge of spatial information.

I´ll flunk you in science if you didn´t know this, because I knew it, boy.

Up to now crystal-clear; notwithstanding is less known that both brains are linked by a bridge which has a terrible strange word that I´m not going name to here. Moreover I don´t remember it.

Well, according to Mr Harari, there are several studies about some people that, on account of disease, were operated on this bridge cutting it off. Professors R. W. Sperry —who obtained the Nobel Prize in 1984— and M. S. Gazzaniga spent many years studying the brain split in a host of patients.

Mr Harari describes a number of these studies carried out by Sperry and Gazzaniga. For instance, a Second World War veteran soldier who had each hand controlled by a hemisphere. Since both brains were split, it happened that his right hand want to open a door and his left one tried to slam the door shut. Another case was a woman whom they showed her a pornographic image. The woman blushed and smiled with a forced smile. «What did you see?» they asked her. «Nothing, just a twinkle», said her left hemisphere. «So, why are you laughing?» Then, her left brain answered again: that machine is very funny.

On one occasion, doctor Gazzaniga showed to one patient one hen foot projected into his left brain and a snowing landscape into his right brain. After that, Mr Gazzaniga handed in to the patient a series of cards so that he could point the card which could tie in with he had seen. His right hand pointed a card with a hen, but, at the same time, his left hand pointed a spade for snow. «Why did you point, simultaneously, the hen and the spade?» Our man answered: the hen foot goes with hen and you need a spade to clean the coop.

You, dear friend, are asking yourself why I´m telling you this and what´s this got to do with politicians? You´ll see.

Mr Harari, following these experiments, sais the left hemisphere always will find a reasonable answer at any time. And the author finishes this chapter explaining one hypothetic situation where the CIA attacks one country without Department of State knowledge, then, when journalists were asking, manipulators would concoct something. In most cases the own DOS is convinced of its fantasies (p. 324). All human beings do a similar mechanism, even in no excisioned brain patients.

Among these patients are politicians. I´m convinced they believe in their own lies from the bottom of their hearts. Those goddam bankiticians can have a great surgical removal brains and their chatterbox left hemisphere starts to talk a load of old tosh, so that these boffins have a clear conscience.

From my Borstal.

LDR