A thing I am horrified not to have thought of when I first read this, or at any time in the ~11 years since (and, looking through the comments, it doesn’t seem like anyone else did, which is also a bit horrifying):
If reality matches fairly closely with Ramachandran’s metaphor and there’s an actual brain subsystem localized somewhere in the left hemipshere that acts as “apologist” and another actual brain subsystem localized somewhere in the right hemisphere that acts as “revolutionary”, we should expect left-hemisphere damage sometimes to have a sort of anti-anosognosic effect by suppressing the “apologist”. Since this sort of apologism is a thing most of us do all the time about everything, anapologetic syndrome should have clearly discernible effects: the patient would lose the ability to confabulate nice explanations for not-so-nice things, in a way that ought to be noticeable since if we didn’t need that ability to function effectively in society it seems like it’d be evolutionarily advantageous to lose it.
This might show up to some extent as depression, which Scott mentions is not uncommon in victims of left-hemisphere brain damage, but it seems much more specific.
You might think: no, this won’t happen, because apologism is just how the brain works; so you have a revolutionary-module and the whole rest of your brain is the apologist. Or you might think: no, this won’t happen, because the relevant module isn’t really an “apologist” but an “explainer” that happens to work in a positively-biased way, so if that module went offline then you’d just completely lost the ability to make sense of the world. BUT both of these seem hard to square with the cold-water trick, which sure does seem as if it’s briefly disabling or shaking up a localized apologism module. Maaaaaybe the apologist is the whole left hemisphere, and damaging bits of it doesn’t do much, but cold-water-squirting somehow changes the state of the whole hemisphere?
(Could it instead be briefly waking up the damaged revolutionary module? No, because it’s right-hemisphere damage that causes anosognosia. The damaged bit is not in the same part of the brain as you’re squirting cold water near to.)
I notice that I am confused. Anyone got good suggestions?
Ok so this is an old comment but apparently nobody responded to it, so: Tons of connections from the brain to the body are swapped. The left arm, leg, and many other things but importantly the left ear are all connected to the right hemisphere.
So, while I’m not certain as to what’s happening here, it briefly waking up the damaged revolutionary module is much more likely than you seem to assume, here.
A thing I am horrified not to have thought of when I first read this, or at any time in the ~11 years since (and, looking through the comments, it doesn’t seem like anyone else did, which is also a bit horrifying):
If reality matches fairly closely with Ramachandran’s metaphor and there’s an actual brain subsystem localized somewhere in the left hemipshere that acts as “apologist” and another actual brain subsystem localized somewhere in the right hemisphere that acts as “revolutionary”, we should expect left-hemisphere damage sometimes to have a sort of anti-anosognosic effect by suppressing the “apologist”. Since this sort of apologism is a thing most of us do all the time about everything, anapologetic syndrome should have clearly discernible effects: the patient would lose the ability to confabulate nice explanations for not-so-nice things, in a way that ought to be noticeable since if we didn’t need that ability to function effectively in society it seems like it’d be evolutionarily advantageous to lose it.
This might show up to some extent as depression, which Scott mentions is not uncommon in victims of left-hemisphere brain damage, but it seems much more specific.
You might think: no, this won’t happen, because apologism is just how the brain works; so you have a revolutionary-module and the whole rest of your brain is the apologist. Or you might think: no, this won’t happen, because the relevant module isn’t really an “apologist” but an “explainer” that happens to work in a positively-biased way, so if that module went offline then you’d just completely lost the ability to make sense of the world. BUT both of these seem hard to square with the cold-water trick, which sure does seem as if it’s briefly disabling or shaking up a localized apologism module. Maaaaaybe the apologist is the whole left hemisphere, and damaging bits of it doesn’t do much, but cold-water-squirting somehow changes the state of the whole hemisphere?
(Could it instead be briefly waking up the damaged revolutionary module? No, because it’s right-hemisphere damage that causes anosognosia. The damaged bit is not in the same part of the brain as you’re squirting cold water near to.)
I notice that I am confused. Anyone got good suggestions?
Ok so this is an old comment but apparently nobody responded to it, so: Tons of connections from the brain to the body are swapped. The left arm, leg, and many other things but importantly the left ear are all connected to the right hemisphere.
So, while I’m not certain as to what’s happening here, it briefly waking up the damaged revolutionary module is much more likely than you seem to assume, here.
Hope that helps!