Surgeons used to cut the corpus callosum, the thick pathway connecting the two halves of the brain. It was an attempt to cure severe epilepsy. The idea was to sever the bridge and the seizure can’t cross it. At first the intervention seemed to work. The patients woke up, recovered, went home. They looked normal and retained their faculties.

Then researchers looked closer, and the patients were not, in fact, fine. They were two. Each half of their brain ran its own life. One hand buttoned the shirt while the other hand undid it. As speech is mostly controlled by one half, the other could not get many words in and fought its battle in silence. The talking half could not shut up. They called these people split-brain.

Engineers later stole the term for a partitioned distributed system where both halves keep running, each convinced it’s the primary.

I don’t remember my surgery. So I’m writing what I do remember.

I’m an American AI researcher and a tech defector in Berlin. Germany is my third immigration, and three is a small sample size. I generalize anyway.

By the way, the other half thinks in Persian, but we are going to mostly ignore him.

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