New account only because I decided to save my main from potential doxing. I've lurked and lurked and lurked though. Big wall of text ahead! If you aren't particularly concerned about the nitty gritty of RP theory, skip to the PS at the end for a hearty laugh

I'm a skeptical man. When I first stumbled upon this sub I didn't really believe much of what you all had to say but after reading The selfish gene by Richard Dawkins, The Red Queen by Matt Ridley, and Sperm Wars by Robin Baker... I'm a believer. Now I'm working through The Blank Slate by Stephen Pinker and I stumbled upon a bit that has convinced me of the last bit I've been skeptical about: the hamster. This is a little read and is mostly aimed at people who need convincing before they believe ideas as absurd as brain circuitry designed for blind rationalization. I'd like to point out that this excerpt highlights some of the ideas presented in softharem's beautifully written post regarding AWALT/AMALT in that the hamster is universal (despite the fact that women are far more well known for using it).

One of the most dramatic demonstrations of the illusion of the unified self comes from the neuroscientists Michael Gazzaniga and Roger Sperry, who showed that when surgeons cut the corpus callosum joining the cerebral hemispheres, they literally cut the self in two, and each hemisphere can exercise free will without the other one's advice or consent. Even more disconcertingly, the left hemisphere constantly weaves a coherent but false account of the behavior chosen without its knowledge by the right. For example, if an experimenter flashes the command “WALK” to the right hemisphere (by keeping it in the part of the visual field that only the right hemisphere can see), the person will comply with the request and begin to walk out of the room. But when the person (specifically, the person's left hemisphere) is asked why he just got up, he will say, in all sincerity, “To get a Coke” — rather than “I don't really know” or “The urge just came over me” or “You've been testing me for years since I had the surgery, and sometimes you get me to do things but I don't know exactly what you asked me to do.” Similarly, if the patient's left hemisphere is shown a chicken and his right hemisphere is shown a snowfall, and both hemispheres have to select a picture that goes with what they see (each using a different hand), the left hemisphere picks a claw (correctly) and the right picks a shovel (also correctly). But when the left hemisphere is asked why the whole person made those choices, it blithely says, “Oh, that's simple. The chicken claw goes with the chicken, and you need a shovel to clean out the chicken shed.” The spooky part is that we have no reason to think that the baloney-generator in the patient's left hemisphere is behaving any differently from ours as we make sense of the inclinations emanating from the rest of our brains. The conscious mind — the self or soul — is a spin doctor, not the commander in chief. Sigmund Freud immodestly wrote that “humanity has in the course of time had to endure from the hands of science three great outrages upon its naïve self-love”: the discovery that our world is not the center of the celestial spheres but rather a speck in a vast universe, the discovery that we were not specially created but instead descended from animals, and the discovery that often our conscious minds do not control how we act but merely tell us a story about our actions. He was right about the cumulative impact, but it was cognitive neuroscience rather than psychoanalysis that conclusively delivered the third blow.

-Stephen Pinker, The Blank Slate 2002 p.31 (on the ebook at least)

PS This is completely unrelated but I frequent OKCupid occasionally and stumbled across this gem. The following is completely verbatum, pulled off the profile of a 3:

im a nice girl who loves to have lots of fun. im looking for a guy whose handsome, will love me 4 who i am rather than what i look like, and who wont lie or cheat on me. some1 who i can trust. i also do not date chubby guys, short guys, african americans im not racist either or guys who are younger than me. i love 2 play video games and watch stuff like anime and read manga. i also love 2 sing, dance and draw and spend a lot of my time drawing. please message me if ur intrested.

-Dumb bitch, OKCupid 2014

Peace