The brain has millions of local processors making important decisions. It is a highly specialized system with critical networks distributed throughou… - Michael S. Gazzaniga

Time and time again, as we will see, the brilliant forebears of modern neuroscience abandoned their fierce reasoning skills and, deus ex machina, threw in a spook at the end of their analysis.

Robert Sapolsky, professor of neurology at Stanford, makes the extremely strong statement: “It’s boggling that the legal system’s gold standard for an insanity defense — M’Naghten — is based on 166-year-old science. Our growing knowledge about the brain makes notions of volition, culpability, and, ultimately, the very premise of a criminal justice system, deeply suspect.

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.