Oops: Grand Lab Tries to Prove Brain Storage of Learning, But Then Pulls the Plug

Neuroscience within academia suffers from a social disease. That disease is the sick culture of academia, a culture suffering from many problems. They include the following:

(1) Neuroscientists are members of a belief community clinging to unwarranted and groundless dogmas such as the dogma that the brain is the source of the human mind and that memories are stored in human brains (a place where microscopic examination has never discovered memories or any trace of anything anyone learned). 

(2) This belief community exists within a hierarchical structure of authority having many resemblances to the hierarchical structure of authority within the Catholic Church. 

(3) There is a "publish or perish" culture within this belief community, in which scientists are judged by how many papers they publish and how many citations such papers get. This culture incentivizes the production of low-quality "quick and dirty" papers, papers often untruthfully making important-sounding claims that may cause such papers to be cited, driving up the citation counts of the paper authors. 

(4) There is a predominance of a variety of Questionable Research Practices such as the use of way-too-small study group sizes, a lack of the use of blinding protocols, and the use of unreliable methods such as trying to judge rodent recall by "freezing behavior" judgments. 

In the paper here we read a description of the Janelia Research Campus, which tried to do neuroscience in a different way. Part of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, this campus was a very fancy set of labs set up on the Potomac River,  55 miles upstream of Washington D.C. The paper here describes this Janelia campus as "a state-of-the-art research campus and community of more than 350 scientists, split between individual research labs, project teams and shared scientific support groups." We read that "the new research campus would have organizational and reward structures very different from those found in academia." We read that one of its goals was to create an environment "insulating Janelia from the dominant academic culture through geographical separation." Wow, I guess the dominant academic culture must be in pretty bad shape if some giant lab would feel the need to insulate itself from that culture.

Below is a short video showing the palatial surroundings of the fancy Janelia Research Campus, which has a staff of 650, a budget of 300 million dollars, and a campus of 689 acres:

In the paper we read that after pondering what goals to pursue, it was decided that the big fancy new neuroscience research campus would undertake two grand goals: " i) understanding how information is stored and processed by neuronal circuits; and ii) developing novel imaging methods and computational tools for image analysis." The first of these research goals was quixotic folly. There has never been any good reason for thinking that learned information is stored in neuronal circuits. No one has ever come up with a decent theory as to how the very many types of things that humans learn could ever be stored in "neuronal circuits."

A recent article at The Transmitter site tells us that now this fancy Janelia Research Campus has decided to "pull the plug" on quite a few of its mouse researchers trying to find "how information is stored and processed by neuronal circuits." We read of a "major course correction." We read, "As part of the change, Janelia is also shuttering two programs and plans to phase out projects that use rodent models, The Transmitter has learned." We may presume that one of these program was the big goal of "understanding how information is stored and processed by neuronal circuits." 

Apparently the Janelia Research Campus was getting nowhere trying to back up claims that memory is stored by in neuronal circuits. Now the big fancy facility is switching gears, focusing on "whole-brain imaging of a transparent fish called Danionella."

The Janelia campus is offering a very comfy transition process for the floundering mouse researchers. The mouse researchers will be given  "roughly three years to wrap up their projects and find new positions, and Janelia plans to provide each researcher with an additional $1 million in transition funding," But despite getting these ridiculously generous terms, we read below that the mouse researchers are furious, and are screaming, "Betrayal!" 

In the Transmitter article we read this: 

 "The facility added the Mechanistic Cognitive Neuroscience program in 2019 and the 4D Cellular Physiology program in 2022. Janelia initially announced that it planned to fund each program for 15 years, but it now plans to close both to make way for the Danionella work".

No one should be surprised. "Mechanistic Cognitive Neuroscience" is a dead end that has produced no robust evidence that minds or memory could arise in any mechanistic or neural way. Those trying to produce such results have produced mainly dead-end misleading results guilty of Questionable Research Practices, results that fail to be reproduced in any convincing way. So we can hardly be surprised that some big lab would "pull the plug" on so failing a project. 

But the Janelia Research Campus has not learned any humility from the failure of its earlier grand plans. Now it announces a different research plan, a plan making mistakes similar to its previous plans. We read that it now has the grand goal of "understanding how the brain generates complex behavior." The brain does not do any such thing, so this goal will fail as badly as the previous goal of "understanding how information is stored and processed by neuronal circuits." Nature never told us that brains generate behavior or that brain store learned information in neuronal circuits. 

Janelia's press release announces this: "Janelia is betting on a decade-long scientific effort to understand how the brain generates behavior, pursuing a mechanistic account that links molecules, neurons, circuits, physiology, computation, and action in a living vertebrate." The vertebrate referred to is the transparent fish. They won't be able to understand how behavior arises from studying a fish.  

You might say "Fool's Errand #1 has been replaced with Fool's Errand #2," but it would probably be more polite to say that Quixotic Quest #1 has been replaced by Quixotic Quest #2.

Postscript: A professor of neuroscience recently boasted that experimental science "has a powerful, century-old tool kit for limiting false inferences," one that includes "preregistered analyses." But the professor confesses that "preregistration remains rare in neuroscience." Oops, it looks like our neuroscientists are not doing what they need to do to avoid false inferences. 

An Interview Leaves You With a "Neuroscientists Gone Wrong" Impression

 At a neuroscience web site with many a misleading article (www.thetransmitter.org), I see an interview with a neuroscientist who boasts that he will correct our misconceptions about the brain. But the neuroscientist starts making some false statements immediately. The interview is entitled "Romain Brette reveals fundamental flaws in commonly assumed neuroscience concepts."

Neuroscientist Romain Brette goes wrong immediately by claiming "Neurons are not components; they are living units, and this is how they should be treated."  Neurons are actually components. The dictionary defines a component as "a part or element of a larger whole." Neurons are components of the brain and components of the human body. 

Brette then soon commits another serious error by stating, "If you look inside a neuron, you will never find some stuff called information." That is dead wrong. Neurons do not have any memory information that anyone has been able to discover. The microscopic examination of brains has never yielded a single speck of information that anyone ever learned -- not a single word or even a single letter or number. But a neuron does have a very large body of information: the genetic information stored in DNA. Such DNA absolutely does have information, specifically information about which amino acids make up particular proteins used by your body. 

It is true that all kinds of false claims have been made about what is in DNA, such as the false claims that DNA stores a recipe, program or blueprint for building a human body But such false claims (debunked here) should not make us go to the erring extreme of denying that the DNA in cells has information. DNA emphatically does have very much information: low-level chemical information. 

Most absurdly, Brette claims that it is "impossible" that a neuron could contain information, which is as erroneous as claiming that it is impossible that a book could store information. 

An interviewer named Paul Middlebrooks then gives us the suggestion that we are being seriously misled by neuroscientists calling the brain a prediction machine. Middlebrooks says this:

"Brains encode information in representations that perform computations to make predictions, right? No, no, no, no, and no. That's what Romain Brette says. That's his response to those ill-conceived notions that neuroscience relies on to try to explain how cognition works." 

Later on in the interview, Brette makes this extremely false claim: "Nothing can contain information." 

But Brette does make some good points. He says that comparisons between computers and brains are invalid, for various reasons. For example, he says this:

"If you just look at a voltage trace of a neuron, it's fluctuating. It is not stable. People then talk about firing rates because they want to have stable quantities, but it's a cheat. Of course, if you measure anything, you get a number, but whatever it refers to is actually fluctuating. The next second, you get a different number. Intrinsically, it's a fluctuating system. It's not like a bit that you can write and then later on read several times."

Later Brette criticizes the talk of neuroscientists who confuse cognition with computation. He says this:

"Logical propositions are coded in the activity of the neuron. That was the assumption that, deep down, it's computation with smaller operations, small logical operations, and every kind of behavior is something like that. It's a theory, right? It just didn't turn out to be correct. It is basically a theory that cognition is made of computation."

Brette is referring here to the theory of computationalism, debunked in my four posts here. The theory commits two huge errors. The first is describing the brain as if it was something like a computer. The brain lacks almost all of the characteristics of a computer, as shown in the diagram below. The second error of computationalism is conflating computation with cognition. Cognition requires an understanding and conscious mind, and no computer is a mind. 

Later Brette makes this statement, which seems to complain of misleading language by his neuroscientist colleagues:

"It's kind of a mashup of different ideas that you find in the neuroscience literature. You have a mashup of classical computationalism when you say that you have mental representations that the brain computes and so on. You have connectionism where, in fact, not everything is symbols. Are there neural representations? Yes, sometimes, but sometimes they are not. I don't know. It's intermediate variables which don't necessarily represent something in particular. Then, you also have dynamical talk in neuroscience, but that is referred to in terms of computation. It's completely confusing."

The interview is promoting Brette's new book "The Brain, in Theory." Looking that book up on Amazon, I read this in the description of the book: "He [Brette] proposes understanding the brain as a self-organized, developing community of living entities rather than an optimized assembly of machine components." The brain as a community? That sounds as misguided as "the brain as a computer." 

If you look up the book on Amazon, you can read its beginning. I did that, and I was not very impressed by its first pages. Brette starts out (pages 2-3) by arguing that the brain cannot be like a computer, because computers are engineering, and Darwin said that organisms are just products of unguided natural processes, not results of deliberate purpose. How silly to be starting out your book on brains by saying that we must follow Darwin rather than starting out by appealing to the relevant physical facts about brains. You can debunk "the brain is a computer" idea easily enough without appealing to authority, by discussing the lack of similarity between brains and computers. 

Brette has a blog, and on that blog he states this: "A striking fact about mainstream theories of the brain is that they take their inspiration mostly from theoretical computer science and engineering theory ('codes', 'computation', 'algorithms', 'information' (in bits), etc.), while being largely ignorant of theoretical biology (e.g. theories of life, organisms and evolution), and even dismissive of biology (just 'implementation')." It seems that those outside of the neuroscience field are not the only ones saying much is amiss with neuroscientist theories of the brain. 

On the page here of his blog, Brette addresses the issue of reproduction, one which biologists have failed to credibly explain. Brette states this:

"One fundamental question is: how can a system produce a copy of itself? This question was famously addressed by von Neumann, who argued that the system must build a new copy from instructions, i.e., the genome is a representation of the organism. I have shown that this does not apply to living organisms and proposed an alternative (11). The alternative is that the parent system simply produces a new system that depends on the parent’s structure, but not necessarily a copy. Production becomes self-reproduction as iterated systems converge to a fixed point, in the absence of building instructions. The genome then acts as a transmissible constraint shaping development, not building instructions. In other words, biological reproduction is an emergent property."

Brette seems to realize that genomes have no instructions for building a body. Correct -- genomes do not even have instructions for how to build a cell or any of its organelles or any instructions on how to build protein complexes.  This is a gigantic clue about the fundamental nature of reality, one of two reasons why the origin of every human is a miracle beyond the explanation of today's science. Scientists cannot explain morphogenesis because DNA lacks any specification for how to build a body or any of its organs or cells. So scientists lack a credible account of how you physically arose. And they also lack an explanation for how you mentally arose, because of endless reasons (discussed at length at this site) why brains fail to explain minds and memory. 

A materialist does not escape that problem by making the nonsensical claim that "biological reproduction is an emergent property." A property is a simple characteristic of something, such as height, weight, mass, volume and so forth. For humans, biological reproduction is a nine-month process of the most enormous complexity. Calling that a "property" is as absurd as calling your life a property.

In one post of his blog, the neuroscientist  Brette confesses that "there is currently no convincing theory of consciousness." 

I watched on television recently a four-part series on the meltdown of the nuclear reactor at Chernobyl. The story of Chernobyl is a story of how overconfidence in experts led to massive numbers of people being poisoned by radioactivity. The Soviet Union haughtily thought of its nuclear scientists as being the greatest in the world. But the Chernobyl reactor had a terrible design flaw. Because of the flaw, when someone pressed a button that was supposed to shut down the reactor for a test, this caused the opposite result: a runaway increase in the nuclear reactions, causing a meltdown. 

Largely because of overconfidence in technoscientific experts, very many got poisoned by the meltdown at Chernobyl. And largely because of overconfidence in biology experts, the thinking of very many got poisoned, when they uncritically accepted unbelievable dogmas being peddled by brain specialists whose bungling has been as bad as those who designed the reactors of Chernobyl. We have a strong reason for suspecting that another case of bungling by technoscientific experts in Eurasia caused a disaster worse than Chernobyl. But amazingly, people keep bending their knees to authorities, and keep following the bad speech customs fostered by neuroscientists. And so, rather than making unobjectionable and indisputable claims such as "I had trouble remembering" or "I was thinking a little slowly," people make silly dogma-dripping statements  such as "my brain had trouble remembering" and "my brain was thinking slowly." 

Psychologists May Misrepresent Their Research As Badly As Neuroscientists Often Do

 Sometimes you may read some moonshine in the science news, some bunk article promoting the latest science paper, and then ask yourself: who is to blame for this baloney, this BS? Is it one or more of the paper authors, or is it the author of a university press release, or is it some science journalist working from the press release and the paper?  So you have a kind of "figure out the culprit" challenge that is a bit like playing the board game Clue. 

Who was the confusion culprit?       

In April 2026, we had an example of very bad BS and baloney in the science news.  Quite a few "science news" web sites were claiming something like an explanation of ghosts had been found. It was all an example of fake news, because the stories were a discussion of a newly released science paper that never even mentioned ghosts.

The science paper was one entitled "Infrasound exposure is linked to aversive responding, negative appraisal, and elevated salivary cortisol in humans" which you can read here. The paper made no use of the word "ghost," no use of the word "apparition," no use of the word "spirit," no use of the word "paranormal," and no use of the word "supernatural." Some experiment was done in which some of the subjects were exposed to an inaudible type of sound called infrasound. As payment for their participation, the student subjects were paid the miserably low compensation of 1% of course credit, which is basically nothing. 

No convincing results on effects of infrasound were produced. The paper tells us " Participants were randomly assigned to one of four groups: (i) infrasound on + calming music, (ii) infrasound off + calming music, (iii) infrasound on + unsettling music, and (iv) infrasound off + unsettling music, resulting in a 2×2 grouping structure." So the study group size was only 9, way too small for any reliable result to be reported. The minimum number of subjects per study group for a study like this to qualify as decent evidence would be about 15 or 20 subjects per study group. We have here another piece of shoddy research, a low-quality study. 

Nothing of any interest was reported, and nothing of any relevance to the topic of ghosts was reported. None of the subjects bombarded by infrasound reported seeing a ghost or sensing a ghost or feeling spooked.  The paper fails to discuss any evidence that any of the subjects experienced fear. The authors report that those who were subjected to ultrasound had higher cortisol levels, but the study group sizes are so low that such a claim is not well founded. Cortisol is not a chemical that correlates with stress. 

The paper authors collected self-reports of how their tiny study groups felt. The only psychological effects associated with being subjected to infrasound were irritability, "disinterest" and sadness. None of those things have any relation to ghost sightings or feelings of being in a haunted house or suspicions that a spirit is around. And since the study group sizes are so tiny, being way-too-small for any reliable association to be reported, we have in this study nothing of any relevance to reports of the paranormal or reports of the supernatural or reports involving suspicions of ghosts or sightings of ghosts. 

When writing up their paper, the paper authors have not been guilty of implying their research has any relevance to reports of the paranormal.  But something very different and extremely misleading went on when one of the paper authors talked to the press. 

And so we have a Fake News headline at www.futurism.com, an article with the phony headline of "Scientists Say They’ve Figured Out What Causes 'Ghosts' ”.  How on Earth could the article writer possibly have got that headline to describe a science paper that made no mention of ghosts or the paranormal?

Maybe it was because one of the paper authors misspoke very badly, by trying to gin up some "ghost relevance" to his "ghost irrelevant" poorly designed study. We read this quote: 

" 'What infrasound may do is supply a bit of bodily discomfort that a ghost or haunting explanation can then attach itself to,'  Rodney Schmaltz, a psychologist at MacEwan University in Canada, and coauthor of a new study published in the journal Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience, told The Guardian. 'For someone who is not inclined to think in terms of ghosts, the same sensation would probably just register as a stuffy, uncomfortable old building. For someone who is already primed, it might feel like proof of a spirit or presence.' ”

Schmaltz misleads us by trying to make it sound like a scientific paper that made no mention of ghosts or the supernatural has some relevance to explaining reports of ghosts. He mentions "a bit of bodily discomfort," but his paper fails to report any such thing for the people who were exposed to infrasound. 

Later Schmaltz states this:

"Whether they were listening to calming instrumental music or something more unsettling, the infrasound shifted their mood and their stress response in a negative direction,” Schmaltz told The Guardian. “In plain terms, you cannot hear infrasound, but your body and your mood appear to respond to it anyway, and the response tends to be unpleasant.”

Schmaltz's low-quality study has failed to produce any decent evidence for such an effect, because the reported difference in "irritability" is so small (just barely qualifying as statistically significant), and the study group sizes so small,  that no good evidence has been produced for any such effect.  A paper as silly as Schmaltz's would be one that rubbed ice cubes on people's backs, with the authors then bragging to the press that this explains reports of apparitions. Of course, people reporting apparition sightings don't have ice cubes rubbed on their backs when that happened; and they also are not bombarded by infrasound. 

No, Split-Brain Patients Do Not Have "Two Conscious Minds in One Skull"

Once again, we have an article in which a neuroscientist misinforms us very badly on the very important topic of split-brain patients. This time it is an article I read recently at the MIT Press Reader. The article is entitled "What Split-Brain Patients Reveal About Consciousness." After discussing facts that contradict his claim, the author (neuroscientist Christof Koch) senselessly refers without any warrant to "two conscious minds in one brain." 

A split-brain patient is typically a patient who underwent an operation severing the corpus callosum, a mass of fiber-like nerves that connect the left hemisphere of the brain and the right hemisphere of the brain . Each of these hemispheres makes up half of the brain. Such an operation is typically done to treat very severe and frequent seizures. Below is a Google Gemini infographic on the topic of this operation, called a corpus callosotomy. 

After this operation is performed, a person is left with two disconnected brain halves. If it were true that your brain makes your mind, such an operation should produce two minds in the same individual. But no such thing happens. 

In 2014 the wikipedia.org article on split-brain patients stated the following:

"In general, split-brained patients behave in a coordinated, purposeful and consistent manner, despite the independent, parallel, usually different and occasionally conflicting processing of the same information from the environment by the two disconnected hemispheres...Often, split-brained patients are indistinguishable from normal adults."

Neuroscientist Koch tells us something similar in the middle of his article. He states this:

"Remarkably, once these 'split-brain' patients recover from the surgery, they are inconspicuous in everyday life. They see, hear, and smell as before; they move about, talk, and interact appropriately with others, and their IQ remains unchanged. They have their usual sense of self and report no obvious alteration in their perception of the world — no shrinkage of their visual field, for example. The surgeons who pioneered this operation, including Joseph Bogen at Loma Linda University in Southern California, were puzzled by this lack of clear symptoms." 

Koch then goes into an account claiming that certain things were observed in split-brain patients. It is the kind of account that typically goes on when authors will be making false "two minds in one skull" claims: an account that has no link to particular papers. What we have is flimsy anecdotal evidence making claims about what supposedly happened in a handful of patients. We don't have straightforward accounts of what was observed, but accounts that are littered with dubious or unbelievable interpretations. And we don't have specific mentions of what exactly one particular identified person did. Koch states this:

"If specific data are given to one hemisphere, that information is not shared with its twin on the other side. Furthermore, only one hemisphere, typically the left one, speaks. That is, if the right hemisphere is lost or silenced by anesthesia, the patient can still talk, which is why the left hemisphere is called the dominant hemisphere. The right hemisphere by itself has only limited language comprehension and is mute, though it can grunt and sing. So, when engaged in conversation with a split-brain patient, it is the person’s left hemisphere that is doing all the talking."

Data is given to persons, not to single hemispheres in the brain. And there is never any evidence that learned information is stored in a brain.  The microscopic examination of brain tissue has never revealed the slightest trace of anything anyone learned,  nor have any brain scans. It is not a hemisphere of the brain that speaks or comprehends or sings, but a person who speaks and comprehends and sings. So Koch is writing erroneously when he states "only one hemisphere, typically the left one, speaks"; and he is speaking just as erroneously when he says that the right hemisphere sings; and he is speaking just as erroneously when he claims that the right hemisphere comprehends something.   Both hemispheres of the brain are equally active in normal people and split-brain patients, so it is ridiculous to say of anyone "only one hemisphere, typically the left one, speaks." Brain hemispheres don't speak or sing or comprehend; people speak and sing and comprehend. 

In the paragraph quoted above and his next paragraph, Koch fails to link to any scientific papers, and fails to mention any specific persons who were observed.  He mentions some alleged perceptual difficulties in split-brain patients. Using the phrase "the patient" in an ambiguous way, he claims that "The patient can’t name an object presented in the left visual field because that image is processed by his mute right visual cortex." We can't tell whether he is referring to only one patient or to split-patients in general. Koch also makes this claim:

"If a key is placed in the patient’s right hand, with the hand under the table and out of sight, they will quickly name it. Touch information from their right hand is transmitted to their left hemisphere, where the object is identified, and its label is relayed to the language center. If the key is placed in the person’s left hand, however, the patient is unable to identify it and rambles on."

But what confidence can we have in such claims, as Koch does not mention any source for such generalizations? If there were actually good evidence for such claims, why would Koch have failed to link to the relevant paper reporting this claim? And if a single paper reported seeing such a thing in one person, why should we assume that such a thing is generally true of split-brain patients, without substantial replication of such a result?

We then have this extremely weak piece of evidence, which consists of an anecdote involving one person, and a dubious self-report provided by that person:

"Victor Mark, a neurologist at the University of North Dakota, videotaped an interview with a split-brain patient. When asked how many seizures she had following her operation, her right hand held up two fingers. Her left hand then reached over and forced the fingers on her right hand down. After trying several times to tally her seizures, she paused, then simultaneously raised three fingers with her right hand and one with her left. When Mark pointed out this discrepancy, the patient commented that her left hand frequently did things on its own. A fight ensued between the two, looking like slapstick comedy. Only when the patient grew so frustrated that she burst into tears was I reminded of her sad situation."

As evidence of anything, this is extremely weak. We have no link to the original account. We do not have a link to this video, or a transcript of what the patient said.  Someone (maybe Victor Mark) has claimed that the "patient commented that her left hand frequently did things on its own." But we don't know exactly what the exact words of the patient were, and we don't know whether that was a response to some "leading question" suggesting such a thing. What we have is a second-hand account of someone claiming that a brain-damaged person said a particular thing. That is extremely flimsy as evidence. We don't know what exactly the patient might have meant by saying such a thing; and we can't be sure that any such thing was said as Koch suggests.

Koch then states this, making an outrageous misstatement that has no warrant in  the few anecdotes he has presented:

"Studies with split-brain patients, work for which Sperry was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1981, teach us that cutting the corpus callosum cleaves the cortico-thalamic complex in two but leaves consciousness intact. Both hemispheres are independently capable of conscious experience, one being much more verbal than the other. Whatever the neural correlates of consciousness are, they must exist independently in both hemispheres of the cerebral cortex. Two conscious minds in one skull. "

Two conscious minds in one skull? Nothing that Koch has discussed provides any warrant for such a claim. To the contrary, Koch's previous statement contradicts such a claim.  As I previously mentioned, Koch stated this:

"Remarkably, once these 'split-brain' patients recover from the surgery, they are inconspicuous in everyday life. They see, hear, and smell as before; they move about, talk, and interact appropriately with others, and their IQ remains unchanged. They have their usual sense of self and report no obvious alteration in their perception of the world — no shrinkage of their visual field, for example."

Split-brain patients do not have two conscious minds, but a single unified conscious mind.  The result of split-brain operations dividing a brain into two separated halves is a result the opposite of what we would expect under claims that brains make minds. 

It is almost always the same when neuroscientists or layman  materialists tell this  outrageous falsehood that split-brain patients have two minds. Almost always, they do not link to any relevant papers. Almost always, all that is offered is a few crummy anecdotes, which usually take the form of second-hand evidence or third-hand evidence.  Basically what is going on is a tactic of "give them an inch, and hope they take a mile." Don't fall for such silliness, which is not following decent standards for evidence. 

In Chapter 7 of the book you can read here, we have on page 111 a paper from 1944:

We have a report on two split-brain patients who had their  corpus callosum severed, leaving them with two separated brain hemispheres. The first one (called Case 1) was a married farmer. On page 113 we read that his "corpus callosum was sectioned completely" to treat seizures. This means the fibers connecting his two brain hemispheres were completely severed.  

Here is the page discussing the patient's split-brain operation severing his corpus callosum,  and the patient's status after the operation:

We have no report of anything very unusual. There is nothing to justify any claim of "two conscious minds in one skull." Contrary to Koch's claim about dysfunction in the left hand of people with split brain operations removing the corpus callosum connecting the two brain hemispheres, we are told on the page shown above that this Case 1 split-brain patient with a severed corpus callosum "was able to write with either hand with eyes open or when blindfolded." 

Page 115 suggests that a later examination indicated there were no big problems detected with this split-brain patient:

There is nothing in the account of this paper to give any support for the claim that split-brain patients have "two conscious minds in one skull." We are told that the patient could correctly interpret skin writing, and the wording suggested this skill persisted in both hands. 

The scientific paper "Functional outcomes in adults following corpus callosotomy: A systematic review" (which you can read here) summarizes case studies of split-brain patients who had their corpus callosum severed.  We have a systematic methodology that approaches this topic in a scientific way, unlike Koch's palm-full-of-wobbly-anecdotes affair. The paper summarized 15 different studies reviewing 73 different subjects having the split-brain operation.  18 of these subjects are identified as "Total CC," by which the paper means a total corpus callosotomy completely severing the corpus callosum, leaving two disconnected brain hemispheres.  

We read at the beginning of the paper that "Intellectual quotient is largely preserved post corpus callosotomy of different extents." We later read this: "Three individuals that underwent a total CC [corpus callosotomy] were reported to have maintained their pre-surgical level of intellectual functioning at the time of post-surgical follow-up [[18], [19], [20]], while one individual was reported to show a decline despite a reduction in seizure burden [21] (Table 2)." 

Under the "brains make minds" dogma, we should expect that this "total CC" (corpus callosotomy) involving a complete severing of the corpus callosum should have produced radical intellectual disability or total mental incapacity. But the paper says that "intellectual functioning (refer to Section 3.1), whether divided into verbal and performance based abilities, or a general IQ, appeared to be largely preserved following varying extents of ACC as well as complete CC [corpus callosotomy] , with 27/30 cases across all reviewed studies for GIQ reporting a positive outcome (i.e. stable or improved)."  

Contrary to what we would expect from "brains make minds" claims, the people left with two divided brain hemispheres mostly maintained their intelligence at the same level, as measured on IQ tests. 

We hear no mention at all in the paper of anything like "two conscious minds in one skull" being the result of the corpus callosotomy that splits a brain into two separated hemispheres. The continued repetition of such false claims about split-brain operations by some neuroscientists should cause us to ask: in what other cases do brain experts blatantly misinform us?

A  scientific study published in 2017 set the record straight on split-brain patients. The research was done at the University of Amsterdam by Yair Pinto. A press release entitled “Split Brain Does Not Lead to Split Consciousness” stated, “The researchers behind the study, led by UvA psychologist Yair Pinto, have found strong evidence showing that despite being characterised by little to no communication between the right and left brain hemispheres, split brain does not cause two independent conscious perceivers in one brain.”

The press release states the following: “According to Pinto, the results present clear evidence for unity of consciousness in split-brain patients.” The paper states, “These findings suggest that severing the cortical connections between hemispheres splits visual perception, but does not create two independent conscious perceivers within one brain.”

Searching on Google Scholar for the term "corpus callosotomy" which describes the operation cutting the corpus callosum and separating the brain into two halves, I find several other long systematic reviews and meta-analysis papers, none of which say anything about any "two conscious minds in one skull" effect. Another example is the paper here. Should we believe that all those very many pages discussing the effects of this operation would fail to mention it producing a "two conscious minds in one skull" effect so spectacular and important, if it actually occurred? No, we should not. It's far more credible that neuroscientist Christof Koch simply told us a groundless "old wives' tale" to try to prop up some narrative claiming brains make minds. 

See my post here for a citation of many other scientific articles and scientific papers debunking the groundless myth that split-brain operations produce "two conscious minds in one skull."

Split-brain patients who underwent surgery to split their brains are not the only people with two separated brain hemispheres. Sometimes split-brain subjects arise when the corpus callosum fails to form during the mother's pregnancy. This is called agenesis of the corpus callosum. Making a generalization about people born without a corpus callosum connecting the two sides of the brain, a scientific paper states this:

"The major anatomic feature of Primary AgCC  [agenesis of the corpus callosum] is the absence of the corpus callosum....Primary AgCC has surprisingly limited impact on general cognitive ability. Although the full-scale IQ may be lower than expected based on family history, scores frequently remain within the average range."

We hear no mention of any "two minds in one body" effect. Another paper states this, using the term "agenesis of the corpus callosum" which means a failure of someone's body to ever have  the corpus callosum connecting the two halves of the brain:

"In the 37 adult cases of agenesis of the corpus callosum, 19 (51%) had some degree of intellectual impairment, with the remainder being judged to have a normal IQ. Of those with learning difficulties, two thirds had a mild impairment, and one third had a moderate or severe problem."

So roughly half of these 37 split-brain people had a normal IQ. You can find papers on the condition of being born with no corpus callosum by searching on Google Scholar for papers having the phrase "agenesis of the corpus callosum."  You will not find any discussion of "two minds in one body" in such papers about split-brain subjects, which helps show that the claim of such an effect is groundless.