Michael S. Gazzaniga Quotes

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.

There was another major phase of split-brain research where we studied the patients as a way of getting at the other questions very much alive in neuroscience, everything from questions about visual midline overlap to spatial attention and resource allocations. At this point the split-brain patients provided a way of examining cortical-subcortical relationships, and other matters.

After my talk, he went into some kind of rant about how the “odd human case” didn’t mean much of anything and that it was sort of a bizarre consequence of prior epilepsy, etcetera.

There is a growing consensus that a major factor in developing larger brains was the banding together in social groups, which made hunting and gathering more efficient and also provided protection from other predators.

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.

Hence at any moment only part of the visual elements of a scene is available for conscious perception.

Crawford concludes that Homo sapiens could not have evolved on the savannas but instead were holed up at the beach, gathering along the shoreline.

have long-chain polyunsaturated lipid ratios

We don't learn to talk, as most think. We start to talk when our brain is good and ready to say something.

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

Or really, the question is: Is there a difference between when life begins and when life as a human begins?

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.

So before you are aware that you're thinking about moving your arm, your brain is at work preparing to make that movement!

Libet has provided us with an intriguing possible mechanism for explaining why we think we are doing in real time things that we have in fact already done.

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.