enabled conscious experience itself — we humans enjoy mental states that arise from our underlying neuronal, cell-to-cell interactions. Mental states… - Michael S. Gazzaniga

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

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.

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.