Show Notes
There was a woman in Los Angeles, in the spring of nineteen sixty-two, who had begun to watch her husband's hands.
Not his face, which was the same face. The hands. In the evenings he would reach for the newspaper the way he had for twenty years, and his right hand would pick it up, and his left hand would take it from him and put it down again — quite firmly, as if the two of them had not been consulted about the same decision. She told the doctors. One of them wrote it down, and it is in the record to this day.
Tonight is the left brain and the right brain — the two halves everybody has heard of, the logical one and the creative one, and the quiz that tells you which one you are.
The tale first, at full strength: a plain room in Pasadena with a screen four feet square, a shutter that opens for a tenth of a second — faster than an eye can move out of the way — and a man who says he saw nothing while his hidden left hand comes back holding the thing he never saw. A boy asked why he chose a snow shovel who answers, without pausing, that you need one to clean out the chicken shed.
Then the argument, still running. Two Italian patients whose perception was split while the person, their testers argue, was not. A reply from the graduate student who ran the first shutter, now an old man. And in twenty twenty, twelve authors from both camps agreeing in one flat sentence that after sixty years the evidence cannot decide whether there is one mind in there or two.
Then the record, quieter and stranger than the legend — the towel on the table and the cloth fringe on the shield, put there so one half of a man could not overhear the other; the second room, fourteen years later, that the story always forgets is a different room; and the boy's famous two answers, which were never two answers to one question at all.
And at the end, why it survived: a surgeon who named the halves in 1969, a paper that turned a task into a type of person in 1972, and a Sunday magazine in September 1973 that printed it in the plural of persons. Ninety-one per cent of British teachers still say it is true.
A calm, unhurried telling of the record, for sleep, rest, or a long drive in the dark. Nothing here will startle you or wake you.
More from Lantern and Ledger
In a parish office in Haggerston, in the first years of the reign, a registrar sat filling in a printed form about the streets where the dying was worst. He wrote down the drainage. He wrote down the water. Then he added a third line nobody had asked him for, standing up for his neighbours — that the people there were generally of cleanly habits, and that what was wrong with their streets was not their doing.
In a farmhouse room on a small island in Nova Scotia, somewhere in the eighteen-nineties, a county historian stood looking at paper silhouettes on a wall — the cut-out profiles people made of one another before photography. One of them was of a woman who had been a servant in the Treasurer's house at Halifax. The man who built that room had been born into slavery in South Carolina, got out during the Revolution, took his owner's surname because it was the name he had, and came north with the Loyalists. His name was Samuel Ball, and no likeness of him has ever existed.
On a summer day in Hertfordshire in sixteen seventy-eight, a poor man who cut grass for a living ran after a farmer along a track beside three half-acres of ripe oats, to offer to do the work for less than he had asked a moment earlier. The farmer refused anyway, and said with a stern look and a hasty gesture that the Devil should mow it rather than he. That night, the pamphlet says, the field showed as if it were all of a flame, and in the morning the oats lay cut in a circle so neatly that no mortal man could do the like.
In the spring of nineteen hundred, sponge divers from the island of Symi sheltered from bad weather off a rock between Kythera and Crete, and one of them went down on a rope in canvas and lead and tinned copper, with his air coming down a hose from a hand pump on the deck. He had perhaps ten minutes. What he was standing on was the cargo of an ancient ship — bronze and marble statues, glass, gold, coins — and one corroded lump about the size of a thick book that nobody recognised for the better part of a year, while the beautiful things beside it were cleaned and admired and photographed.
In eighteen eighty-four, in Baltimore, two men sat at a table with a rebuilt post-office scale and a pack of shuffled playing cards, pressing weights too small to feel onto each other's fingertips. One of them marked almost every answer as a pure guess — and was right two times in three anyway.