Yair Pinto
Unity of consciousnessCross-cueing
in Split brain
Yair Pinto, cognitive scientist and experimental psychologist at the Department of Psychology and the Amsterdam Brain and Cognition Center, University of Amsterdam. A consciousness researcher in the recurrent-processing tradition associated with Victor Lamme, he led the 2017 study that reopened the question of what the split brain does to conscious experience.
Stake§
Theoretical and reputational. The work is openly revisionist — set against the Sperry–Gazzaniga textbook reading and positioned within a particular camp in consciousness science — so it carries an agenda the paper states rather than hides.
Pinto's contribution to this topic is an explicit, named challenge to its founding interpretation. Testing two callosotomy patients across many tasks, his 2017 Brain paper confirms that perception is split — the hemispheres cannot compare across the visual midline — but finds that the patients can report a stimulus anywhere in the field with either hand or by speaking, which he reads as one conscious agent rather than two. The result turns on ruling out cross-cueing, and it presses not only on Sperry's reading but on modern theories that tie consciousness to information integration.