Michael S. Gazzaniga Quotes

The first visit involves the challenge of the unknown, curiosity, adventure, often youth, and sometimes adrenaline. On a revisit, you are returning older, with more life experience under your belt, to familiar territory; it is not so challenging, your curiosity is not so piqued, you know more or less what to expect, you have less adrenaline pumping. You feel different, not necessarily worse or better, just different. This is true not just for returning to locales but also for trying to recapture any past experience.

How come the left brain doesn’t complain about the fact that it is no longer conscious of things on the left side of space? Imagine having your brain disconnected. Imagine waking up in your hospital room the next morning and, as your surgeon walks in to see how you are faring, you only see the left half of her face. Don’t you think you would notice that the right half is not there? The thing is, you would not. In fact, your left hemisphere wouldn’t even be conscious of the fact that there is a left half of space. But this is the weird part: I spoke as if the new, split version of you were just your left hemisphere, and that is not true. You are also your right hemisphere. The new “yous” have two minds with two completely separate pools of perceptual and cognitive information. It is just that only one of the minds can readily speak. The other initially cannot. Perhaps, after many years, it will be able to produce a few words.

Hume concluded that many of the questions that philosophers asked were pseudo questions — that is, questions that cannot be answered with the likes of logic, mathematics, and pure reason because their answers will always be founded at some level on an unprovable belief, on an axiom. He thought that philosophers should stop wasting everyone’s time writing copiously about pseudo questions, dump their a priori assumptions, and rein in their speculations, as the scientists had. They had to reject everything that was not founded on fact or observation, and that included eliminating any appeal to the supernatural.

I propose that what we call “consciousness” is a feeling forming a backdrop to, or attached to, a current mental event or instinct. It is best grasped by considering a common engineering architecture called layering, which allows complex systems to function efficiently and in an integrated fashion, from atoms to molecules, to cells, to circuits, to cognitive and perceptual capacities. If the brain indeed consists of different layers (in the engineering sense), then information from a micro level may be integrated at higher and higher layers until each modular unit itself produces consciousness. A layer architecture allows for new levels of functioning to arise from lower-level functioning parts that could not create the “higher level” experience alone. It is time to learn more about layering and the wonders it brings to understanding brain architecture. We are on the road to realizing that consciousness is not a “thing.” It is the result of a process embedded in an architecture, just as a democracy is not a thing but the result of a process.

Research has shown that 150–200 people are the number of people that can be controlled without an organizational hierarchy.23 It is the number of people one can keep track of, maintain a stable social relationship with, and would be willing to help with a favor.

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?

Consciousness is not the product of a special network that enables all of our mental events to be conscious. Instead, each mental event is managed by brain modules that possess the capacity to make us conscious of the results of their processing. The results bubble up from various modules like bubbles in a boiling pot of water. Bubble after bubble, each the end result of a module’s or a group of modules’ processing, pops up and bursts forth for a moment, only to be replaced by others in a constant dynamic motion. Those single bursts of processing parade one after another, seamlessly linked by time. (This metaphor is limited to bubbles roiling up at a rate of twelve frames a second or faster; or consider a cartoon flip book, where the faster we snap the pages, the more continuous the movements of the characters appear.)

It’s difficult to get our heads around the idea that each bubble has its own capacity to evoke that feeling of being conscious; it rubs up against our own intuitions about the holistic nature of our personal consciousness. What are we and our intuitions missing? We are missing the illusion part, the part we humans (with our powerful left hemisphere inference mechanism) are so good at missing. We aren’t actually missing the illusion; rather, we are missing the fact that our smoothly flowing consciousness is itself an illusion. In reality it is made up of cognitive bubbles linked with subcortical “feeling” bubbles, stitched together by our brain in time.

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.

As evolutionary neurobiologists Leah Krubitzer and Jon Kaas put it, Although the phenotype generated is context-dependent, the ability to respond to the context has a genetic basis. . . . In essence, the Baldwin effect is the evolution of the ability to respond optimally to a particular environment. Thus, genes for plasticity evolve, rather than genes for a particular phenotypic characteristic, although selection acts upon the phenotype.

W.J. was a warm, affable man, and the two hemispheres of his brain seemed to be working fine together, although they were no longer in direct communication. One of them talked, one of them didn’t. Given the way the brain is wired, that meant the left, talking brain viewed the visual world to the right of a fixated point and the right, non-talking hemisphere viewed all the visual information to the left of the same point. Given this surgical state, I wondered: If I flashed a light over to the right, would W.J. say he saw it? Light should go to the left hemisphere, and the left hemisphere had speech; it should be easy. It was, and W.J. easily declared he saw it. A bit later, I flashed the same light over to the left side of space and waited to see if he would say anything. He didn’t. I pressed him and asked if he had seen anything, and he firmly said “No.” Was he blind on that side? Or was that simple spot of light no longer communicated to the half brain that talked? Did the seemingly mute right brain know it had viewed a light? Was it conscious? What was going on?

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 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.

The computer scientists Jeff Clune, Jean-Baptiste Mouret, and Hod Lipson did what computer scientists do: they designed computer simulations.23 They used well-studied networks that had sensory inputs and produced outputs. What those outputs were determined how well the network performed when faced with environmental problems. They simulated twenty-five thousand generations of evolution, programming in a direct selection pressure to either maximize performance alone or maximize performance and minimize connection costs. And voilà! Once wiring-cost-minimization was added, in both changing and unchanging environments, modules immediately began to appear, whereas without the stipulation of minimizing costs, they didn’t. And when the three looked at the highest-performing networks that evolved, those networks were modular. Among that group, they found that the lower the costs were, the greater the modularity that resulted. These networks also evolved much quicker — in markedly fewer generations — whether in stable or changing environments. These simulation experiments provide strong evidence that selection pressures to maximize network performance and minimize connection costs will yield networks that are significantly more modular and more evolvable.

The tension felt in the modern world between those who look at the confluence of neuroscientific data, historical data, and other information illuminating our past and those who simply accept received wisdom as their guide in life is real and profound. Yet it may not be as divisive as one would think. It appears that all of us share the same moral networks and systems, and we all respond in similar ways to similar issues. The only thing different, then, is not our behavior but our theories about why we respond the way we do. It seems to me that understanding that our theories are the source of all our conflicts would go a long way in helping people with different belief systems to get along.