Skullmates at Work
How many complete inner monologues could you host, and how would you know?
We carry around a strong social fiction. One skull, one “I.” The thing that feels like you is taken to be the owner of the body. Other language is tolerated as poetry. “A part of me wanted to leave.” “My heart wasn’t in it.” No one really believes there is a second subject in there. Your own behavior does not bear that fiction out.
Everyday coworkers
Sometimes, reading a book, I’ll catch myself mid‑page with no memory of what I just read. My eyes tracked each line, my hand reached for the page corner, and some supervisory process slammed the brakes. “Nope, none of that landed. Go back.” Someone was reading closely enough to regulate page turns. It wasn’t the same “me” that noticed the gap.
Driving is worse. Put me on a familiar route while I am on a phone call and some other operator takes the wheel. It negotiates lane changes, executes merges, and chooses exits with competence. When I hang up, I get a little summary. It’s my first chance to emotionally process the near miss I already lived through.
Whoever cleans my kitchen during calls is a lot less tedium averse. Cabinets are closed. Counters are wiped. Dishes are queued in the dishwasher in a way I would never bother with if you handed me the task directly. Whoever that guy is, he is much less allergic to tidying than the one typing this. He seems to have slightly different preferences for what is boring or satisfying.
Even my “voice” is not a unit. When talking to me, you get a frightened chipmunk. Silence longer than a second feels like danger, so it throws out the first answer‑shaped sentence it can assemble. Somewhere behind that, another process is quietly cooking up prompts for what to hit next—this study, that caveat, don’t forget the example. Talking‑me grabs whatever is nearest and turns it into continuous speech. Michael Scott put it best. “Sometimes I’ll start a sentence and I don’t even know where it’s going. I just hope I find it along the way.”
Typing‑me is that back‑room generator without the chipmunk. At three‑figure WPM, I can get the written response to you almost as fast as the spoken one, but it will be radically different in content and thoughtfulness. Typed, you’re getting the prompts nonlinearly reworked by the same part of me that came up with them. Dictating voice to text? Deer-in-headlights pauses as worlds collide. This is why “I thought of the perfect comeback later” is a universal experience. Your typist voice finally got a shot at composing.
Where do ideas actually come from? Not from the place where I can hear words. I’ll restate a problem a few ways, feel nothing, give up, and then an answer arrives fully formed. Something nonlinguistic snaps into place and my narrator is now rushing to put words around it. It feels like Gödel, Escher, Bach’s GOD Over Djinn requests. Submit questions to an oracle, get back answers, and don’t ask how they were produced. Ideation is our highest-level thinking, not subprocess grunt work.
We have names for all of this—autopilot, muscle memory, subconscious, intuition—and then do something cowardly. We take the one narrator that happens to have speech and let it retroactively claim ownership over everything the other workers do. That’s the polite story. A federation of dumb little agents’ interactions create the appearance of a single self. It is safe and bloodless. All the magic happens at the level of “emergent behavior.” The data does not let you stay that safe.
Two people, one cable
A more brutal perspective comes from the surgery where we literally turn one of those workers into a second person. The corpus callosum is the thick cable connecting your hemispheres. In some severe epilepsies, surgeons cut most or all of it. Afterward, the patient looks fine. They can talk, joke, and fill out forms. If you did not know about the procedure, you would not guess anything was amiss.
The change only shows up when you exploit their new wiring. Each hemisphere gets visual information from the opposite half of space and controls the opposite hand. The left hemisphere usually owns speech. So you fix the patient’s gaze and flash two different pictures, one in each half of the visual field: a chicken claw to the left hemisphere and a snowy scene to the right hemisphere. Then you put a bunch of pictures on a table and ask them to pick whatever matches what they saw with each hand.
The right hand picks a chicken. The left hand, controlled by the silent right hemisphere, picks a shovel. When you ask, “Why’d you choose the shovel?” he does not say, “I have no idea, one of my hands is being run by a stranger.” He says, “The chicken claw goes with the chicken, and you need a shovel to clean out the chicken shed.” One hemisphere saw claws. The other saw snow. Each picked the right object. The talker, which never saw the snow, calmly invented a story that makes both choices sound like parts of the same plan. Flash “WALK” to the right side and he’ll get up. Why? Whatever story fits—thirst, restlessness, wanting a Coke.
The standard gloss is that this reveals our talent for rationalization. The left hemisphere is desperate to maintain a sense of authorship, so it will confabulate any reason for any action, no matter where that action originated. That is the terror‑management reading. The more honest one is that you took one person and turned him into two.
It is not a metaphor. The right hemisphere in these experiments can hear, recognize objects and words, follow multi‑step instructions, and plan simple behaviors. It is not a dumb reflex bank. It is a quiet worker that lost the cable to speech. That it cannot commandeer the mouth does not mean it does not have its own inner monologue. You can insist cutting disrupts the routing of a normally integrated whole, but at minimum, the hardware is perfectly capable of supporting more than one. Why is it so important to pretend those workers are all mindless daemons instead of other people?
Specialists sharing you
Nothing in this arrangement says there has to be just one worker of this kind. You can have specialists stacked on specialists. One constantly scanning for threats to your standing, one obsessing over unfinished commitments, one that doesn’t care about status or guilt at all and is blissfully happy to grind through dishes and email as long as you point it at a list. They all read off the same world and hear the same sentences. They just care about different things.
None of these look like Minsky’s cute little sub‑agents. They are not cartoon fragments screaming “do this” in a void. They are whole policies, defined over your entire world‑model, that happen not to have direct access to speech.
Julian Jaynes imagined a bicameral mind where one half issued commands as a “god voice” and the other half obeyed. I think he was wrong about the history, but not about the architecture. Split‑brain work shows you can have at least two subjects over one map. The autopilots and idea oracles show you can have multiple near‑person‑level workers over the same map. Put that together and you get a picture where “you” are not a single captain, but one among potentially many fully conscious individuals.
Borrowed hands
Sometimes the quiet workers get a chance to act in public. Facilitated communication was a fad where helpers held up keyboards for nonverbal and autistic people, often children, and “supported” their hand as they typed. Miraculously, fluent sentences appeared. Parents were told their kids had rich inner lives that just needed a conduit.
Then someone did the obvious control. Show the facilitator and their nonverbal client different pictures and ask them to type what they saw. Across many studies, the typed answers only track what the facilitator saw. When the helper sees DOG and the client sees CAT, the board spells DOG. When the helper doesn’t know the answer, neither does the board.
You would think that would kill the practice. Instead it keeps resurrecting itself under new names. The current rebrand is Telepathy Tapes, which takes the same pattern and hints it is some supernatural communication instead of what might be even odder—the facilitator unknowingly talking to themselves through someone else’s body.
Ask those facilitators if they feel like they’re doing the typing and they will say no. They experience themselves as lightly supporting someone else’s movements. But the keystrokes reliably encode their own knowledge, not the client’s. The narrating self is not lying. It is just not the one operating the muscles.
Our term for this is the ideomotor effect. Your subconscious will make tiny movements “you” are unaware of. That sounds an awful lot like the split-brain experiment without the surgery. How many terms do we need to launder the multiple‑monologue theory?
Dowsing probably does work, just not for the advertised reason. The rods have no magic. The dowser has spent so long looking for water and training on hits and misses that some part of him can spot where it’s likely to be. His intuition knows more than his narrator can say. The rods wave because that part of him is quietly steering his hands, the way the typists for nonverbals move the keyboard. When in a new city, I sometimes dowse for blue mailboxes by turning down streets purely on vibes, counting on some worker in my head who learned GeoGuessr for mailboxes to deliver us to success.
In Tell Them You Love Me, a facilitator “interpreting” for a nonverbal man ended up in a sexual relationship with him. The typed messages professed his love and desire and consent. Courts concluded the words were not his. They were hers, routed through his body. Once you accept that, you have to ask an uncomfortable question. Who was she in a relationship with? The silent man in the wheelchair, or a layer of her own mind using his fingers as a keyboard to send a love letter to its own skullmate?
Scientific reports about facilitated communication are careful. They say “the facilitator is the author of the messages.” They do not say which part of the facilitator. From the outside, there is just a human body generating text. From the inside, the narrator insists it was not them. That gap is exactly what you would expect if one self is happily executing a script and another is explaining the output.
How many are you
You can take the conservative exit. Maybe there are quirky subsystems that do driving and cleaning and pointing at letters, and a confabulating interpreter in the left hemisphere, and some spooky dowsing tricks. But underneath there is still only one subject. Everything else is just plumbing: the mechanisms are small, the self is a convenient summary, and any talk of extra “people” is poetic exaggeration.
I think the evidence justifies a step past that. You do not have to believe in any new kind of stuff. You do not have to abandon physicalism. You only have to stop insisting that the hardware we have discovered to support at least two full consciousnesses under a cut must, when intact, mysteriously collapse into one.
There may be multiple person‑level readers hanging off the same map. They can drive, tidy, return ideas, and generate full sentences from prompts. We know the right hemisphere can follow instructions and move your hand but rarely gets to talk. All of them operate over the same geometry. Maybe their inner world feels very different with such different priorities and different I/O privileges.
Jaynes called his version “bicameral.” Two chambers, a god‑voice and an obedient subject. That is a good start and too small. The split‑brain patients show we can have at least two full chambers over one world. The everyday autopilots show that some of those chambers can run your life for a while if they get the chance.
How often is that coalition actually you, the reader? You can pretend it’s 100%, but your own examples will not cooperate. Pages unread, drives unremembered, conversations on autopilot—these are all cases where another policy was steering while you narrated after the fact. Be generous and give the narrating “I” half of your waking behavior. I would bet the true share of actual control is much lower than we’d like to admit.
If that sounds unsettling, notice that nothing about your actual day changes when you admit it. Whatever else is in there has been doing its job for decades. It already drove you home last night. It already prevented you from stepping into traffic while your attention was on your phone. It already forced your hand to finally reply to that email. It already handed you half the good ideas you have ever had, and a decent fraction of the bad ones.
The only lever you really get is attention. You can start watching the hand‑offs. Notice which problems your workers pick up on their own, which chores they happily do, which situations they handle better than the narrator. Treat them less as glitches and more as colleagues. You will never hear their inner monologues, but you can learn their styles. The best you can do is keep an eye on who is moving your hands.
Tomorrow, how your other selves keep happiness in tune, and why you shouldn’t mess with it yourself.