Michael S. Gazzaniga Quotes

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.

Dennett handles this problem by denying it. He laments that one of the problems with explaining consciousness is that we all think we are consciousness experts, and have very strong beliefs about it, just because we have experienced it. He complains that this doesn’t happen to vision researchers. Even though most of us can see, we don’t think we are vision experts. Dennett claims that consciousness is the result of a bag of tricks: our subjective experience is an illusion, a very believable one, one that we fall for every time, even when it has been explained to us how it comes about physically, just like some optical illusions that still fool us even though we know how they work.

Mother Nature has figured out a way to get rid of the extra neurons through a process called “pruning.” With appropriate input from the environment, the unnecessary neurons die off, and an acceptable number connect the two structures at the end of the developmental period. But, of course, here comes the fragility. Frequently the pruning is overdone. Indeed, evidence has accumulated that developmental mistakes in pruning lead to autism11 and schizophrenia.12 “Robust yet fragile” is everywhere, and the concept is central to realizing how the brain is organized.

The next phase of the work was when Joseph LeDoux and I came up with the idea of the interpreter. Twenty-five years into studying these patients we finally got around to asking the patients, "Why did you do that?" after they had a response with the left hand that was being governed by the separated, silent, speechless right hemisphere. We began to understand that the left hemisphere "made up" a story as to why the patient did what he/she did, and in that moment we began to see the cardinal feature of the left hemisphere: the ability to interpret actions generated outside its realm of conscious awareness.

Marc Kirschner and his Berkeley colleague John Gerhart.20 They wondered whether modern creatures have cellular and developmental mechanisms with the characteristic of what is called evolvability. That is, do they have the ability to generate heritable phenotypic variation? And is the characteristic of evolvability itself under selection pressure? That is, will biological systems that produce more phenotypic variations that can be passed on to their offspring be more

People with a right parietal lobe injury, for example, will commonly suffer from a syndrome called spatial hemi-neglect. Depending on the size and location of the lesion, patients with hemi-neglect may behave as if part or all of the left side of their world, which may include the left side of their body, does not exist! This could include not eating off the left side of their plate, not shaving or putting makeup on the left side of their face, not drawing the left side of a clock, not reading the left pages of a book, and not acknowledging anything or anyone in the left half of the room. Some will deny that their left arm and leg are theirs and will not use them when trying to get out of bed, even though they are not paralyzed. Some patients will even neglect the left side of space in their imagination and memories.3 That the deficits vary according to the size and location of the lesion suggests that damage that disrupts specific neural circuits results in impairments in different component processes.

Hare and Tomasello think that the social behavior of chimps is constrained by their temperament, and the human temperament is necessary for more complex forms of social cognition. In order to develop the level of cooperation that is necessary for humans to live in large social groups, humans had to become less aggressive and less competitive.

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

Just before I left for Long Island and my new life, I got another call, this one from Dr. Ernest Sachs, up at Dartmouth Medical School. He was head of neurology at the time, and he invited me up to give a lecture. I was thrilled. I was to play the role of professor at my old alma mater! It was especially sweet because the very same medical school had rejected my application eleven years earlier, even though I was an undergraduate at Dartmouth and my brother was one of their stellar graduates. It is events like this in one’s past that fall off the story line. What if I had been accepted and gone? There would have been no split-brain work for me. How would that whole story have been different? I believe that things just happen in life, and pretty much after the fact, we make up a story to make it all seem rational. We all like simple stories that suggest a causal chain to life’s events. Yet randomness is ever present.

Evolutionary theories allowed materialist theories of consciousness to come in two flavors: emergentism and panpsychism. The former proposes that consciousness emerges from unconscious matter once that matter achieves a certain level of complexity or organization. Sperry was leaning heavily in this direction. The latter, panpsychism, tosses the whole problem out by suggesting that all matter has subjective consciousness, albeit in a wide range of types. The idea here is that there is no need for the idea of emergence and complexity to explain consciousness. Consciousness is a primordial feature of all things, from rocks to ants to us.

When you hear a good joke, this is the system that kicks in and produces the giggly face.

Amid great anticipation, Giacomo slowly lowered the electrode into the callosum. As is commonly done in neurophysiology, the recording system was hooked up to a loudspeaker so that the rat-tat-tat of the neurons firing could be heard. We were ready to hear the Morse code of the brain.
Then it happened. The electrode pierced the callosum. Instead of the rat-tat-tat we expected, the loudspeaker boomed with the excruciatingly clear voice of Ringo Starr singing, “We all live in a yellow submarine, a yellow submarine, a yellow submarine.” Giacomo looked up from the cat and calmly said, “Now that is what I call high-order information.” Some kind of electronic ground loop had been closed, and we were picking up the local radio station. We all laughed, though we knew this brain code thing was going to be a long haul.

How on earth does lifeless matter become the building blocks for living things? How do neurons turn into minds? What should be the vocabulary used to describe the interactions between the brain and its mind? When humankind finds some answers, will we be disheartened by what they are? Will our future understanding of “consciousness” simply not be fulfilling? Will it be simple yet cold and harsh?

when we consider DNA, the genotype is the DNA sequence that contains instructions for the living organism. The phenotype is the observable characteristics of an organism, such as its anatomy, biochemistry, physiology, and behavior. The genotype interacts with the environment to produce the phenotype. To put this in an everyday situation, consider the blueprint as a house’s genotype and the actual house its phenotype. The phenotypic construction process is the building of the house using the blueprint as information about what and how to do it. The phenotype is related to the genotype that describes it, but there is a world of physical difference between the genotype and the phenotype and even the phenotypic construction process. For one, the genotype is non-dynamic; it is a quiescent, one-dimensional sequence of symbols (DNA’s symbols are nucleotides) that has no energy or time constraints. Like a blueprint, it can sit around for years, as you have probably learned from watching CSI. The genotype dictates what should be constructed (perhaps a really cute dog), but the DNA itself does not look or act anything like a cute dog. On the other hand, the phenotype (the cute dog) is dynamic and uses energy, especially if it is a border collie.

What if conscious experience is managed by each module? Lose a module to injury or stroke, and the consciousness that accompanies that module is gone, too. Remember: patients with hemi-neglect aren’t conscious of one-half of space because the module that processes that information is no longer working. Or, if the modules responsible for locating oneself in space are not being integrated properly, conscious experience is deeply affected, and one ends up with the feeling that someone else is there just over your shoulder. Or, take people with Urbach-Wiethe disease, which leads to deterioration of the amygdalae: they no longer experience the emotion of fear.