Michael S. Gazzaniga Quotes

enabled conscious experience itself — we humans enjoy mental states that arise from our underlying neuronal, cell-to-cell interactions. Mental states do not exist without those interactions. At the same time, they cannot be defined or understood by knowing only the cellular interactions. Mental states that emerge from our neural actions do constrain the very brain activity that gave rise to them. Mental states such as beliefs, thoughts, and desires all arise from brain activity and in turn can and do influence our decisions to act one way or another. Ultimately, these

there were only one person in the world, would the concept of personal responsibility have any meaning? I would suggest it would not and in that truth, one can see that the concept is wholly dependent on social interactions, the rules of social engagement. It is not something to be found in the brain. Of course, some concepts that would lack meaning if nobody else were around are not wholly dependent on social rules or interactions. If there were only one person, it would be meaningless to say that he is the tallest person or taller than everyone else, but the concept of “taller” is not wholly dependent on social rules.

Chaos doesn’t mean that the system is behaving randomly, it means that it is unpredictable because it has many variables, it is too complex to measure, and even if it could be measured, theoretically the measurement cannot be done accurately and the tiniest inaccuracy would change the end result an enormous amount.

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

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.

It was only twenty-five years ago that the philosopher Joseph Levine officially dubbed it the explanatory gap, which he later described in his book Purple Haze: We have no idea, I contend, how a physical object could constitute a subject of experience, enjoying, not merely instantiating, states with all sorts of qualitative character. As I now look at my red diskette case, I’m having a visual experience that is reddish in character. Light of a particular composition is bouncing off the diskette case and stimulating my retina in a particular way. That retinal stimulation now causes further impulses down the optic nerve, eventually causing various neural events in the visual cortex. Where in all of this can we see the events that explain my having a reddish experience? There seems to be no discernible connection between the physical description and the mental one, and thus no explanation of the latter in terms of the former.2

Plainly stated, I believe consciousness is an instinct. Many organisms, not just humans, come with it, ready-made. That is what instincts are, something organisms come with. Living things have an organization that allows life and ultimately consciousness to exist, even though they are made from the same materials as the non-living natural world that surrounds them. And instincts envelop organisms from bacteria to humans. Survival, sex, resilience, and walking are commonly thought to be instincts, but so, too, are more complex capacities such as language and sociality — all are instincts. The list is long, and we humans seem to have more instincts than other creatures. Yet there is something special about the consciousness instinct. It is no ordinary instinct. In fact, it seems so extraordinary that many think only we humans can lay claim to it. Even if that’s not the case, we want to know more about it. And because we all have it, we all think we have insight into it. As we will see, it is a slippery, complex instinct situated in the universe’s most impenetrable organ, the brain.

stimulation of the medial frontal cortex gives one the feeling of the urge to move

Shitij Kapur, a psychiatrist, neuroscientist, and professor at King’s College London, distinguishes for us the difference between hallucinations and delusions: “Hallucinations reflect a direct experience of the aberrant salience of internal representations,” whereas delusions (false beliefs) are the result of “a cognitive effort by the patient to make sense of these aberrantly salient experiences.

Reductionism in the physical sciences has been challenged by the principle of emergence. The whole system acquires qualitatively new properties that cannot be predicted from the simple addition of those of its individual components. One might apply the aphorism that the new system is greater than the sum of its parts. There is a phase shift, a change in the organizational structure, going from one scale to the next.

First — and this has to do with the very nature of brain-enabled conscious experience itself — we humans enjoy mental states that arise from our underlying neuronal, cell-to-cell interactions. Mental states do not exist without those interactions. At the same time, they cannot be defined or understood by knowing only the cellular interactions. Mental states that emerge from our neural actions do constrain the very brain activity that gave rise to them. Mental states such as beliefs, thoughts, and desires all arise from brain activity and in turn can and do influence our decisions to act one way or another. Ultimately, these

Time and time again, as we will see, the brilliant forebears of modern neuroscience abandoned their fierce reasoning skills and, deus ex machina, threw in a spook at the end of their analysis.

some types of neurons may be found only in specific species.

the study of psychophysics proves that it is impossible to bore a German.” Thankfully,

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.