Believing is Seeing

According to Michael Guillen, in Believing Is Seeing: A Physicist Explains How Science Shattered His Atheism and Revealed the Necessity of Faith:

During the 1960s and 1970s, neurosurgeons began severing the corpora callosa of their epileptic patients’ brains in hopes of diminishing or even eliminating their seizures.[9] This daring technique worked well enough to earn its inventors the 1981 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.[10] But the surgery also produced some shocking side effects in these split-brain patients. For example, a man named Joe. When a photo of a frying pan is presented to Joe’s right-hand field of view (apprehended by the LH), he readily sees and identifies it. But when it’s shown to his left-hand field of view (apprehended by the RH), Joe sees nothing. Absolutely nothing. But when he closes his eyes and draws whatever first comes to mind, he instantly sketches a frying pan—and doesn’t know why![11] Joe’s strange experience underscores one of the most striking differences between the brain’s fraternal twins. The LH sees the world, knows about it consciously, and can easily describe it verbally. The RH is blind to the world yet knows about it unconsciously and can describe it nonverbally. This blockbuster discovery has enormous implications beyond just neuroscience. First, it demolishes the idea of “seeing is believing” and affirms the principle of “believing is seeing.” If you choose to believe only in what you can see and name, you’re literally being half-brained. You’re putting all your faith in what your brain’s LH alone can see. You’re ignoring realities that are invisible to you, but that your brain’s RH can somehow behold; realities like the frying pan photo Joe couldn’t see and couldn’t put into words, but that he was able to express nonverbally.