History of neuroscience
During the second half of the first millennium BC, the Ancient Greeks developed differing views on the function of the brain. However, due to the fact that Hippocratic doctors did not practice dissection, because the human body was considered sacred, Greek views of brain function were generally uninformed by anatomical study. It is said that it was the Pythagorean Alcmaeon of Croton (6th and 5th centuries BC) who first considered the brain to be the place where the mind was located. According to ancient authorities, "he believed the seat of sensations is in the brain. This contains the governing faculty. All the senses are connected in some way with the brain; consequently they are incapable of action if the brain is disturbed...the power of the brain to synthesize sensations makes it also the seat of thought: The storing up of perceptions gives memory and belief and when these are stabilized you get knowledge." In the 4th century BC Hippocrates, believed the brain to be the seat of intelligence (based, among others before him, on Alcmaeon's work). During the 4th century BC Aristotle thought that, while the heart was the seat of intelligence, the brain was a cooling mechanism for the blood. He reasoned that humans are more rational than the beasts because, among other reasons, they have a larger brain to cool their hot-bloodedness.
Dual consciousness
In 1978, Michael Gazzaniga and Joseph DeLoux discovered a unique phenomenon among split-brain patients who were asked to perform a simultaneous concept task. The patient was shown 2 pictures: of a house in the winter time and of a chicken's claw. The pictures were positioned so they would exclusively be seen in only one visual field of the brain (the winter house was positioned so it would only be seen in the patient's left visual field (LVF), which corresponds to the brain's right hemisphere, and the chicken's claw was placed so it would only be seen in the patient's right visual field (RVF), which corresponds to the brain's left hemisphere.