You Two

Epileptics suffer from storms of neural activity. From start loci, waves of energetic chaos criss cross the white matter, triggering uncontrollable tics and movements. We treat this with drugs, with pills designed to prevent these mental typhoons. For some unfortunates, this doesn't work. Their only option is a corpus callosum sectioning, a slice down the middle of their brain, isolating each hemisphere in its own universe.

This can work, breaking the communication lines used to spread the energetic disorder. Oddly enough, the complete isolation of a hemisphere doesn't really lead to much. Our brains are redundant, and one cerebral hemisphere is typically completely dominant. One side (typically the left) handles the speaking, the thinking, the general interaction with society. The other half contributes, but more subtly, and the dominant half can assume its responsibilities.

But the isolated half does not shrivel and die. Each hemisphere has the capacity to support a personality on its own. In the event of a hemisection, both often do. The right brain, marooned and isolated develops its own thoughts and activities, and can interact with the body without your conscious awareness. The right brain sees things you dont, interprets things on its own. It has first crack at sensory awareness from the left side, and its perceptions are subtly altered from yours. It is you, but split off, the moment of conception marked with the downward stroke of the surgeon's knife. It will draw things you cannot see, think things you don't think, and exist as an involuntary passenger in your body.

Our conception of self is a pillar of how we see the world. We are the individual, the observer, the center of our own universe How do we understand it then, when a simple surgical procedure can split us into cerebral siamese twins, two passengers stuck in the same body?