Michael S. Gazzaniga Quotes

Recently, researchers captured an unbelievable picture of a small group of photons as waves and another group behaving as particles at the same time.14 Although the idea of complementarity is now established in physics, it is not widely seen as a possible foundational idea for thinking about the mind/brain explanatory gap. I think it should be, and first want to look at how physics came to accept its seemingly puzzling reality. Following its acceptance in physics, the idea of complementarity may prove itself to be key to thinking about biology, and about the mind/brain gap in particular.

Alzheimer’s disease, which is associated with the production and accumulation of amyloid-β in the brain. That means he has serious neural damage all over the brain. While for the past twenty years or so amyloid has been considered the “cause” of Alzheimer’s, there is recent evidence against that hypothesis, and others are being entertained.1 At any rate, the disease results in the slow destruction of the brain, commencing particularly with the loss of neurons in the entorhinal cortex and the hippocampus, resulting in short-term memory loss. The disease can become so debilitating that it can completely reshape Grandpa’s personality, transforming him from a lively and caring person into a listless shell of his former self. Yet, though he may not recognize me, he is still cognizant of social niceties and shakes my hand. He may wander off, but he will still feel fear when confused and lost, and anger when frustrated. His conscious experience of the world is brought to him through whatever operational neural circuitry continues to function, and as he loses function, it becomes more restricted. The contents of that conscious experience most likely are odd, very different from those of the normal brain or his past self. As a result, odd behavior follows.

While there are more neural connections within a half brain than between the two halves, there are still massive connections across the hemispheres. Even so, cutting those connections does little to one’s sense of conscious experience. That is to say, the left hemisphere keeps on talking and thinking as if nothing had happened even though it no longer has access to half of the human cortex. More important, disconnecting the two half brains instantly creates a second, also independent conscious system. The right brain now purrs along carefree from the left, with its own capacities, desires, goals, insights, and feelings. One network, split into two, becomes two conscious systems. How could one possibly think that consciousness arises from a particular specific network? We need a new idea to cope with this fact.

What exactly is the role of the cerebral cortex in producing consciousness? The cortex expands the number of ways in which we can experience the world, which allows for a vast variety of possible conscious experiences and responses.

Festinger was the intellectually intense discoverer of “cognitive dissonance,” the idea that when a personal belief is challenged by new information, we tend to ignore the new information in order to reduce mental conflict.

As in any layered system, however, the system can become jeopardized if a core component that transfers information from one layer to another malfunctions. In the case of biological tissue, if the kinds of proteins that connect cells together are defective, then information may not be able to transfer from the individual-cell layer to the tissue layer, and the entire system could shut down. While not perfect, the layered design of biological systems is advantageous because it minimizes the number of points in the system that, if attacked, would result in catastrophic damage, and it limits the effects of attacks at other points.

Penfield wrote, “Consciousness continues, regardless of what area of cerebral cortex is removed. On the other hand consciousness is inevitably lost when the function of the higher brain stem (diencephalon*) is interrupted by injury, pressure, disease, or local epileptic discharge.” Yet he is quick to qualify that “to suggest that such a block of brain exists where consciousness is located, would be to call back Descartes and to offer him a substitute for the pineal gland as a seat for the soul.”6

So now we know that modular systems have many advantages, but how do they do it? How do thousands of independent localized modules work together to coordinate our thoughts and behaviors and, ultimately, produce our conscious experience?

We live in the era of the “bottom line” mentality, with TED talks, sound bites, and news summaries. There is so much information to digest, we can only hope to grasp the world with compact and seemingly complete stories. We don’t want to be left dangling.
We are all suckers for this information diet, and we all have come to depend on it, just like we have all succumbed to the instant gratification of texting and cell phones. And yet what separates the dilettante from the sophisticate is the appreciation that everything is not simple. The trick seems to be able to talk clearly while remaining fully aware of the underlying complexity of any story. For me it is the overwhelming realization that when trying to figure out how the brain does its masterful trick of
enabling minds, we are barely at the starting line. Dig as deep as you want into human history: As long as there is a written record of thought, there is a record of humans wondering about the nature of life. It becomes obvious that all of us are just hopping into an ongoing conversation, not structuring one with a beginning, a middle, and an end. Humans may have discovered some of the constraints on the thought processes, but we have not yet been able to tell the full story.

There obviously is a different feel to a wave of intense emotion versus an abstract thought, but each conscious form is an experience that gives us a unique perception of reality. The pattern in which these various conscious forms come in and out of awareness gives us our own personal life story. The vast variety of conscious forms and the ubiquity of consciousness in the brain are best explained by a modular architecture of the brain. The conceptual challenge now is to understand how hundreds, if not thousands, of modules, embedded in a layered architecture — each layer of which can produce a form of consciousness — give us a single, unified life experience at any given moment that seems to flow flawlessly into the next across time.

Newton’s laws aren’t fundamental, they are emergent; that is, they are what happens when quantum matter aggregates into macroscopic fluids and objects. It is a collective organizational phenomenon.

When this was done on normal subjects, the brain answered back with the N400 brain wave response when the word was incongruous, but not when it was congruous.

In the brain, the amount of the neurotransmitter dopamine affects the process of salience acquisition and expression. During an acute psychotic state, schizophrenia is associated with an increase in dopamine synthesis, dopamine release, and resting-state synaptic dopamine concentrations.10 Kapur suggests that in psychosis, there is a malfunction in the regulation of dopamine, causing abnormal firing of the dopamine system, leading to the aberrant levels of the neurotransmitter and, thus, aberrant assignment of motivational salience to objects, people, and actions.11 Research supports this claim.12 The altered salience of sensory stimuli results in a conscious experience with very different contents than would normally be there, yet those contents are what constitute Mr. B’s reality and provide the experiences that his cognition must make sense of. When considering the contents of Mr. B’s conscious experience, his hallucinations, his efforts to make sense of his delusions are no longer so wacky, but are possible, though not probable, explanations of what he is experiencing. With this in mind, the behavior that results from his cognitive conclusion seems somewhat more rational. And despite suffering this altered brain function, Mr. B continues to be conscious and aware of his existence.

Robert Sapolsky, professor of neurology at Stanford, makes the extremely strong statement: “It’s boggling that the legal system’s gold standard for an insanity defense — M’Naghten — is based on 166-year-old science. Our growing knowledge about the brain makes notions of volition, culpability, and, ultimately, the very premise of a criminal justice system, deeply suspect.

Nagel states that “an organism has conscious mental states if and only if there is something that it is like to be that organism — something it is like for the organism.” “Like” does not mean “resemble,” such as in the question “What is ice skating like? Is it like roller skating?” Instead, it concerns the subjective qualitative feel of the experience, that is, what it feels like for the subject: “What is ice skating like for you?” (For instance, is it exhilarating?) Nagel called this the “subjective character of experience.” It has also been called “phenomenal consciousness,” and, although he doesn’t say it, it is also referred to as qualia.