A clearer picture of what is happening in the brain during non-REM sleep,14 during sleepwalking,15 and during confused arousals16 has been achieved t… - Michael S. Gazzaniga

" "

A clearer picture of what is happening in the brain during non-REM sleep,14 during sleepwalking,15 and during confused arousals16 has been achieved through neuroimaging and EEG. It appears that the brain is half awake and half asleep: the cerebellum and brainstem are active, while the cerebrum and cerebral cortex have minimal activity. The pathways involved with control of complex motor behavior and emotion generation are buzzing, while those pathways projecting to the frontal lobe, involved in planning, attention, judgment, emotional face recognition, and emotional regulation are zoned out. Sleepwalkers don’t remember their escapades, nor can they be awakened by noise or shouts, because the parts of the cortex that contribute to sensory processing and the formation of new memories are snoozing, temporarily turned off, disconnected, and not contributing any input to the flow of consciousness.

English
Collect this quote

About Michael S. Gazzaniga

Michael S. Gazzaniga (born December 12, 1939) is an American neuroscientist, author and professor of psychology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he heads the new SAGE Center for the Study of the Mind.

Biography information from Wikiquote

Also Known As

Native Name: Michael Steven Gazzaniga
Alternative Names: Gazzaniga, M.S. M. S. Gazzaniga Michael S Gazzaniga Gazzaniga, Michael S.

Go Premium

Support Quotewise while enjoying an ad-free experience and premium features.

View Plans

Related quotes. More quotes will automatically load as you scroll down, or you can use the load more buttons.

Additional quotes by Michael S. Gazzaniga

In order to know the actual location of the electron, a measurement must be made, and here is where the troubles begin for the die-hard determinists. Once a measurement is made, the quantum state is said to collapse, meaning that all the other possible states the electron could have been in (known as superpositions) have collapsed into one. All the other possibilities have been eliminated. The measurement, of course, was irreversible and had constrained the system by causing the collapse. Over the next couple of years physicists realized that neither the classical concept of “particle” nor that of “wave” could fully describe the behavior of quantum-scale objects at any one point in time. As Feynman quipped, “They don’t behave like a wave or like a particle, they behave quantum mechanically.”18

Multi-modular brains have at their beck and call a tremendous number of paths to conscious experience. If one route gets destroyed, another may provide an alternate course. To stamp out consciousness, all modules leading to a conscious state must be shut down. Until this happens, intact modules will continue to pass information from one layer to another and induce a subjective feeling of experience. The contents of that conscious experience may be very different from normal, but consciousness remains. Visiting the neuropsychology clinic, we will see how various assaults on our brain affect consciousness and provide insights into how our brains are organized. It turns out that the endless fluctuations of our cognitive life, which are managed by our cortex, ride on a sea of emotional states, which are constantly being adjusted by our subcortical brain.

Works in ChatGPT, Claude, or Any AI

Add semantic quote search to your AI assistant via MCP. One command setup.

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.

Loading...