Damien Broderick wrote:
> But what I was complaining about seems to me
> so self-evident I hesitate to spell it out. The right lobe of the brain
> *isn't* either `silent' or `inactive'. Take a look at CAT scans, PET
> scans, or olde worlde EEG traces known to the ancients long before Doc
> Leary had his first white light flash. Anyone making such a claim, even as a
> kind of zoned-out metaphor, trips my bogosity meter *big* time.
Not to get too petty here, but its become obvious that you've taken this passage *waaay* too literally, not to mention that in 1977, it was a scientific fact that *linguistically* speaking the right brain was silent! Patients in the classic 1950's experiment (conducted by Roger Perry*) where their corpus collosum was severed, were completely unable to read, write or speak about what their left eye was seeing. This is not some zoned-out metaphor, but a fair assessment of the known facts at that time. This is exactly what Leary meant in 1977, and the fact that you've missed such an obvious fact means that you really need adjust your bogosity meter for more flexible functioning (i.e. it is hardly worth getting so upset over what is a slight difference of semantics).
*Note --For his split brain research, Roger Sperry (1913-1994) shared the 1981 Noble Prize in Physiology and Medicine with David Hubel and Torstein Wiesel.
If what you say is true Damien, this is the first case of a person winning the Nobel Prize for a zoned-out metaphor!
Paul Hughes