Michael S. Gazzaniga Quotes

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.

The issue that captured the church was the issue of ensoulment and when it occurred during development. A church council decided to call it at conception, instead of the time frame St. Thomas Aquinas had argued in the thirteenth century, which was at around three months of gestation.

Margaret Mead once remarked that she thought all Caltech men thought women had a staple in their belly button because the only time they viewed a women naked was in the foldout of Playboy.

As I have mentioned earlier, emotional states appear to transfer between the hemispheres subcortically, and this transfer is not affected by severing the corpus callosum

This great zone of cerebral activity is where plans are made to speak, write, throw a baseball, or pick up a dish from the table.

There were those, such as Karl Lashley, mentioned earlier, who thought that the corpus callosum was merely a structural element that supported the two hemispheres.

When shown a series of photographs of five natural landscapes — tropical rain forest, temperate deciduous forest, coniferous forest, savanna, and desert — the youngest subjects (those in the third and fifth grades) picked the savanna as a preferred landscape. Older subjects equally preferred those landscapes with which they were familiar, as well as the savanna.52 People were happier viewing scenes with trees rather than inanimate objects, and also preferred the shapes of trees with spreading canopies, similar to those found on the African savanna, rather than rounded or columnar ones.

Spontaneous smiles are different. They utilize a totally different neurologic hardware that is diffuse and arises mostly out of the subcortex and something called the extra-pyramidal system.

When people talk about training, they generally mean taking an amorphous mind and shaping it into something. It is the sort of thing that goes on at universities that are not yet in possession of high-quality students. It is not the sort of thing that should go on at serious centers of discovery. Mentoring, on the other hand, is productive, necessary, and enjoyable.

The fact is, life’s successes and failures are sporadic, and their causes are difficult to determine. Hard work and luck are behind most successes, though it is hard to say, for any given success, how much of each there has been.