Mother Nature has figured out a way to get rid of the extra neurons through a process called “pruning.” With appropriate input from the environment, … - Michael S. Gazzaniga

Our subjective awareness arises out of our dominant left hemisphere’s unrelenting quest to explain these bits and pieces that have popped into consciousness. Notice that popped is in the past tense. This is a post hoc rationalization process. The interpreter that weaves our story only weaves what makes it into consciousness. Because consciousness is a slow process, whatever has made it to consciousness has already happened. It is a fait accompli. As we saw in my story at the beginning of the chapter, I had already jumped before I realized whether I had seen a snake or if it was the wind rustling the grass. What does it mean that we build our theories about ourselves after the fact? How much of the time are we confabulating, giving a fictitious account of a past event, believing it to be true? This post hoc interpreting process has implications for and an impact on the big questions of free will and determinism

It was also the test that produced the most astounding observation of all. The left, talking brain didn’t seem to miss the right brain, and vice versa. It didn’t just not miss it — it didn’t even remember it or the functions it had performed, as if the right hemisphere had never existed. For me, this phenomenon is the single most important fact students of mind/brain research must take into account.

The issue that captured the church was the issue of ensoulment and when it occurred during development. A church council decided to call it at conception, instead of the time frame St. Thomas Aquinas had argued in the thirteenth century, which was at around three months of gestation.