So I know chickens who don’t develop strong brain-lateralization end up having slower reaction times etc. My question is, do we have such cases in humans? Humans who don’t lateralize their hemispheres enough, with “overly-connected” hemispheres…? What are these people/their abilities like?

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Humans are much, much different than chickens in terms of hemisphere behavior. How much so? Well, in a way, you’re actually a gestalt of two people. Kinda. The amount of things our brain’s hemispheres do independently and what happens if you interfere with their communication is fascinating.

You can literally put a message in a place where someone with severed hemispherical connections can only see that message with one eye, and get them to respond to the message, then ask them why they just did that thing, and they’ll have no idea. We used to cut the connection to treat epileptics back in the day, if you’re wondering how we know any of that.

There’s also the fact that humans can survive massive brain injury almost unscathed so long as only one hemisphere is damaged. See Phineas Gage, a railroad worker in the 1800s who survived getting a 2 inch iron rod shot through his head. Aside from a major personality change, he was fine. Didn’t even loose much intellect really.

TLDR; the human brain is more like two separate brains working together kinda like a duel-core processor rather than one brain. If half is damaged, the other half can sometimes do everything needed to keep living normally just fine. If communication is severed, you get very odd behavior and “glitches”.

Check out this video for more details. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wfYbgdo8e-8