I'm of two minds about this video

[Arthur_Tuxedo]

CGP Grey video on Split Mind Theory: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wfYbgdo8e-8

I found this video to be fascinating and felt that it shed a lot of light on my own recent experiences. I've been trying to bridge the gap between my current existence and where I want to be, and in order to do that I've had to do things that I do not find interesting or fulfilling in any way, like driving for Uber. Unfortunately, my ability to force myself to do these things has been close to zero, no matter the reward or consequence. For instance, Uber was offering a $1,000 bonus in my city for completing the first 100 rides within 30 days of signing up, but 30 days went by and I was not even close. I tried to force myself to do something menial as a means to an end, and instead a deeper, unseen part of me stepped in and forced me to stop via drinking and staying up late.

I used to think this was a self-destructive impulse borne of low self-worth, but after getting to know and love myself, it's still there. Now I think it's a very real part of me: more genuine than my conscious mind, but I can't access it directly. I can only infer its existence and properties through its effects on other things like a black hole. I believe it knows what I am capable of and will not accept mediocrity, even as a temporary state of affairs. It is also much stronger than my conscious mind and can overpower it most of the time. This limits me greatly because I can't do a bullshit job to pay the bills while preparing for a good one, but it also forces me not to settle for "pretty good" . I thought that this concept of having two minds, one perceptible and one hidden, was a mental construct of my own making to try and understand my personality. It's amazing to find out that it might be scientifically accurate.

Have any of you had glimpses of another mind sharing your brain?

[Spectre_nz]

Personally, no, but anecdotally from friends, yes.

It sounds very much like something that would happen with Bicameralism

I've seen the linked video and read about bicameralism and my reaction to both was 'this sounds like bullshit' since I had to personal experience with such phenomena at all, but, I've since started to wonder if there's a lot of variation within the population; like, there are various degrees of integration of left and right hemispheres. At one end of the spectrum you have, I suppose, what we'd think of as 'normal', a tight integration of two hemispheres that think as a unit, and at the other end of the spectrum, something like Schizophrenia where the person experiences communication with another consciousness that seems totally separate from their own.
But, this is all baseless personal speculation.

As for the anecdote I mentioned at the beginning; While on holiday with friends, one of my group of friends was nearly struck by a car. He was frozen in panic for a moment before diving to the side out of the way. He later related that, at that moment of panic, he heard loud voice seemingly come from inside his head yell 'MOVE' and that was what snapped him out of his 'deer in the headlights' moment and got him to lunge to the side.
Now, he attributes that voice to Jesus, and this same guy's father claimed to have audibly heard the voice of god speak to him when he was in his 20's, so, I was prepared to put all of this down to stress, aural hallucination and a family propensity for whatever it is that puts you at the low end of 'hearing voices', but reading about bicameralism and what happens in some split brain cases makes me reconsider. It all makes me wonder if a large range of things from religious experiences, hearing voices, mental illness and and similar oddities are rooted in the same cause and while it varies from person to person, our consciousness isn't as singular and integrated as we tend to perceive.

Or Maybe the events of the TV series Stargate are real, produced for the purpose of establishing plausible deniability and some of us have Goa'uld living in their skulls.

[Ziggy Stardust]

I don't at all understand your logic, Arthur. Would you mind elaborating? I can't even figure out how your first paragraph really relates to your second, in all honesty. How did you go from the statement that you had a hard time motivating yourself to do things you don't find interesting or fulfilling (which is something that every human ever has struggled with) to the conclusion that "another mind" is sharing your brain?

I would also be cautious in claiming that video is "scientifically accurate" - I haven't watched the entire thing, but the source of the video is from a decidedly non-scientific source, which means you should always be cautious as there may be hidden agendas or biases at work in its presentation. There is nothing particularly scientific about the theory being presented (and the bicameralism that Spectre_nz mentioned is a widely discredited theory), even if it uses some scientific findings as evidence.

[Zixinus]

The idea that the inside of your mind is divided into multiple parts each with different functions is as old as Freud. There is probably some truth to the idea that the brain is battling different impulses of itself but I doubt it's as simple as "you have two sides of your brain so you actually have two brains!".

Also, people who have their brain cut in two should not be used to a baseline for those who don't.

[Esquire]

Hear, hear; I'd also add that humans are famously bad at self- or metaperception. What you think about your own thought processes is not, and can not be an objective scientific observation.

[Arthur_Tuxedo]

I don't at all understand your logic, Arthur. Would you mind elaborating? I can't even figure out how your first paragraph really relates to your second, in all honesty. How did you go from the statement that you had a hard time motivating yourself to do things you don't find interesting or fulfilling (which is something that every human ever has struggled with) to the conclusion that "another mind" is sharing your brain?

We're operating beyond the limits of current neuroscience in this discussion so I can't provide any conclusive evidence, and I could very well be wrong in my interpretations. However, I have found that I have little to no ability to force myself down the wrong path as a means to an end and I wind up sabotaging my efforts whenever I try, but when I find something that aligns with my talents and hasn't already been done, I can produce things that are qualitatively different than anything previously imagined. For instance, my DJAS mod for Space Empires 5 introduced new concepts to the game, like technology diffusion and diminishing returns to scale for research and production that no other mod attempted. Yet I find myself unable to achieve simple things like driving enough hours for Uber to get through the week and pay the bills. When I try, I am confronted by a much stronger part of myself that is easily capable of forcing my conscious self not to do these mundane tasks. I cannot access this hidden part of my mind, but when I look back, I realize that I was trying to force myself to do things that were wrong for me and would have been a waste of time and effort. Thus, the hidden "other" knows better than my conscious mind what is right for me, and I would be wise to heed its signals rather than try to override them, which is an ability that most people seem to have and I lack. I feel that this limitation / advantage will lead me to a more meaningful life than most, albeit one fraught with struggle.

I would also be cautious in claiming that video is "scientifically accurate" - I haven't watched the entire thing, but the source of the video is from a decidedly non-scientific source, which means you should always be cautious as there may be hidden agendas or biases at work in its presentation. There is nothing particularly scientific about the theory being presented (and the bicameralism that Spectre_nz mentioned is a widely discredited theory), even if it uses some scientific findings as evidence.

True, we are at the "leeches and alchemy" stage of understanding how the mind works, and the video that I linked could seem very silly in the coming years. It spoke very deeply to my current understanding of my own mind, but that doesn't make it necessarily true, and I imagine that it won't resonate with most people. Within the next 100 years, we'll know whether theories like these are true or represent elaborate mental constructs.

[Alyrium Denryle]

Okay. Interesting line of thought, but it is the sort of speculative analogy that often happens in the cognitive sciences. Our conscious mind however is distributed throughout the cortex, and many of our basic processes are segregated to one hemisphere or the other.

Every time you want to take action, you have different parts of the brain that crosstalk. If you want to do a job you hate, your prefrontal cortex might rationally know you have to in order to eat, but your ventral tegmental area does not care, and this has nothing to do with some kind of split mind.

You have to keep in mind (har har) that the structures of our brain were built on top of older ones, and your higher cognitive processes still have to operate through the older parts of your brain that include the reward system, and dont actually have a whole lot of independent agency. They cannot make you do things on their own. They can inhibit, they can simulate a future condition and thus train the reward system to find certain things rewarding (and this allows you to do math and engage in a lot of your abstract reasoning)... but your frontal lobe cannot initiate action on its own very well.

When the Corpus Callosum gets severed, all that is happening is that both halves of the brain are no longer operating on a full deck, and reach different conclusions. They have different information and they are missing processes that are performed by the other half. No wonder someone might have Alien Hand Syndrome.

[Arthur_Tuxedo]

Thanks for elaborating! So it seems like the video was overly simplistic and we either have one consciousness made up of many smaller parts or more than two if one chooses to endorse the multiple-minds hypothesis.