have long-chain polyunsaturated lipid ratios - Michael S. Gazzaniga

there were only one person in the world, would the concept of personal responsibility have any meaning? I would suggest it would not and in that truth, one can see that the concept is wholly dependent on social interactions, the rules of social engagement. It is not something to be found in the brain. Of course, some concepts that would lack meaning if nobody else were around are not wholly dependent on social rules or interactions. If there were only one person, it would be meaningless to say that he is the tallest person or taller than everyone else, but the concept of “taller” is not wholly dependent on social rules.

The psychology professor Richard Aslin once commented to me that he felt the idea of “consciousness” was a proxy for a whole host of variables correlated with our mental lives. We use “consciousness” as shorthand to easily describe the functions of a multitude of inborn, instinctual mechanisms such as language, perception, and emotion. It becomes evident that consciousness is best understood as a complex instinct as well. All of us come with a bucketful of instincts. Our incessant thought pattern jumps around. We have feelings about one idea, then its opposite, then our family, then an itch, then a favorite tune, then the upcoming meeting, then the grocery list, then the irritating colleague, then the Red Sox, then … It goes on and on until we learn, almost against our natural being, to have a linear thought.

As I have mentioned earlier, emotional states appear to transfer between the hemispheres subcortically, and this transfer is not affected by severing the corpus callosum