Who's in Charge? Free Will and the Science of the Brain Quotes

“The brain has millions of local processors making important decisions. It is a highly specialized system with critical networks distributed throughout the 1,300 grams of tissue. There is no one boss in the brain. You are certainly not the boss of the brain. Have you ever succeeded in telling your brain to shut up already and go to sleep?”
― Michael S. Gazzaniga, Who's in Charge?: Free Will and the Science of the Brain

“Chaos doesn’t mean that the system is behaving randomly, it means that it is unpredictable because it has many variables, it is too complex to measure, and even if it could be measured, theoretically the measurement cannot be done accurately and the tiniest inaccuracy would change the end result an enormous amount.”
― Michael S. Gazzaniga, Who's in Charge?: Free Will and the Science of the Brain

“Baruch Spinoza, who said, “There is no mind absolute or free will, but the mind is determined for willing this or that by a cause which is determined in its turn by another cause, and this one again by another, and so on to infinity.”
― Michael S. Gazzaniga, Who's in Charge?: Free Will and the Science of the Brain

“Reductionism in the physical sciences has been challenged by the principle of emergence. The whole system acquires qualitatively new properties that cannot be predicted from the simple addition of those of its individual components. One might apply the aphorism that the new system is greater than the sum of its parts. There is a phase shift, a change in the organizational structure, going from one scale to the next.”
― Michael S. Gazzaniga, Who's in Charge?: Free Will and the Science of the Brain

“Our subjective awareness arises out of our dominant left hemisphere’s unrelenting quest to explain these bits and pieces that have popped into consciousness. Notice that popped is in the past tense. This is a post hoc rationalization process. The interpreter that weaves our story only weaves what makes it into consciousness. Because consciousness is a slow process, whatever has made it to consciousness has already happened. It is a fait accompli. As we saw in my story at the beginning of the chapter, I had already jumped before I realized whether I had seen a snake or if it was the wind rustling the grass. What does it mean that we build our theories about ourselves after the fact? How much of the time are we confabulating, giving a fictitious account of a past event, believing it to be true? This post hoc interpreting process has implications for and an impact on the big questions of free will and determinism”
― Michael S. Gazzaniga, Who's in Charge?: Free Will and the Science of the Brain

“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.”
― Michael S. Gazzaniga, Who's in Charge?: Free Will and the Science of the Brain

“Newton’s laws aren’t fundamental, they are emergent; that is, they are what happens when quantum matter aggregates into macroscopic fluids and objects. It is a collective organizational phenomenon.”
― Michael S. Gazzaniga, Who's in Charge?: Free Will and the Science of the Brain

“The classic example from biology is the huge, towerlike structure that is built by some ant and termite species. These structures only emerge when the ant colony reaches a certain size (more is different) and could never be predicted by studying the behavior of single insects in small colonies.”
― Michael S. Gazzaniga, Who's in Charge?: Free Will and the Science of the Brain

“stimulation of the medial frontal cortex gives one the feeling of the urge to move”
― Michael S. Gazzaniga, Who's in Charge?: Free Will and the Science of the Brain

“chapter, however, the modern perspective is that brains enable minds, and that YOU is your vastly parallel and distributed brain without a central command center. There is no ghost in the machine, no secret stuff that is YOU. That YOU that you are so proud of is a story woven together by your interpreter module to account for as much of your behavior as it can incorporate, and it denies or rationalizes the rest.”
― Michael S. Gazzaniga, Who's in Charge?: Free Will and the Science of the Brain

“there were only one person in the world, would the concept of personal responsibility have any meaning? I would suggest it would not and in that truth, one can see that the concept is wholly dependent on social interactions, the rules of social engagement. It is not something to be found in the brain. Of course, some concepts that would lack meaning if nobody else were around are not wholly dependent on social rules or interactions. If there were only one person, it would be meaningless to say that he is the tallest person or taller than everyone else, but the concept of “taller” is not wholly dependent on social rules.”
― Michael S. Gazzaniga, Who's in Charge?: Free Will and the Science of the Brain

“THE HUMAN INTERPRETER HAS SET US UP FOR A FALL. IT has created the illusion of self and, with it, the sense we humans have agency and “freely” make decisions about our actions. In many ways it is a terrific and positive capacity for humans to possess. With increasing intelligence and with a capacity to see relationships beyond what is immediately and perceptually apparent, how long would it be before our species began to wonder what it all meant—what was the meaning of life? The interpreter provides the storyline and narrative, and we all believe we are agents acting”
― Michael S. Gazzaniga, Who's in Charge?: Free Will and the Science of the Brain

“Emergence is when micro-level complex systems that are far from equilibrium (thus allowing for the amplification of random events) self-organize (creative, self-generated, adaptability-seeking behavior) into new structures, with new properties that previously did not exist, to form a new level of organization on the macro level.”
― Michael S. Gazzaniga, Who's in Charge?: Free Will and the Science of the Brain

“some types of neurons may be found only in specific species.”
― Michael S. Gazzaniga, Who's in Charge?: Free Will and the Science of the Brain

“Hare and Tomasello think that the social behavior of chimps is constrained by their temperament, and the human temperament is necessary for more complex forms of social cognition. In order to develop the level of cooperation that is necessary for humans to live in large social groups, humans had to become less aggressive and less competitive.”
― Michael S. Gazzaniga, Who's in Charge?: Free Will and the Science of the Brain

“Young children by age three begin to inhibit some of their naturally altruistic behavior. They become more discriminating about whom they help. They share more often with others who have shared with them in the past.”
― Michael S. Gazzaniga, Who's in Charge?: Free Will and the Science of the Brain

“John-Dylan Haynes22 and his colleagues expanded Libet’s experiments in 2008 to show that the outcomes of an inclination can be encoded in brain activity up to ten seconds before it enters awareness! The brain has acted before its person is conscious of it. Not only that, from looking at the scan, they can make a prediction about what the person is going to do. The implications of this are rather staggering.”
― Michael S. Gazzaniga, Who's in Charge?: Free Will and the Science of the Brain

“second point is how to think about the very concept of personal responsibility in a mechanistic and social world. It is a given that all network systems, social or mechanical, need accountability in order to work.”
― Michael S. Gazzaniga, Who's in Charge?: Free Will and the Science of the Brain

“First—and this has to do with the very nature of brain-enabled conscious experience itself—we humans enjoy mental states that arise from our underlying neuronal, cell-to-cell interactions. Mental states do not exist without those interactions. At the same time, they cannot be defined or understood by knowing only the cellular interactions. Mental states that emerge from our neural actions do constrain the very brain activity that gave rise to them. Mental states such as beliefs, thoughts, and desires all arise from brain activity and in turn can and do influence our decisions to act one way or another. Ultimately, these”
― Michael S. Gazzaniga, Who's in Charge?: Free Will and the Science of the Brain

“enabled conscious experience itself—we humans enjoy mental states that arise from our underlying neuronal, cell-to-cell interactions. Mental states do not exist without those interactions. At the same time, they cannot be defined or understood by knowing only the cellular interactions. Mental states that emerge from our neural actions do constrain the very brain activity that gave rise to them. Mental states such as beliefs, thoughts, and desires all arise from brain activity and in turn can and do influence our decisions to act one way or another. Ultimately, these”
― Michael S. Gazzaniga, Who's in Charge?: Free Will and the Science of the Brain

“As evolutionary neurobiologists Leah Krubitzer and Jon Kaas put it, Although the phenotype generated is context-dependent, the ability to respond to the context has a genetic basis. . . . In essence, the Baldwin effect is the evolution of the ability to respond optimally to a particular environment. Thus, genes for plasticity evolve, rather than genes for a particular phenotypic characteristic, although selection acts upon the phenotype.”
― Michael S. Gazzaniga, Who's in Charge?: Free Will and the Science of the Brain

“Research has shown that 150–200 people are the number of people that can be controlled without an organizational hierarchy.23 It is the number of people one can keep track of, maintain a stable social relationship with, and would be willing to help with a favor.”
― Michael S. Gazzaniga, Who's in Charge?: Free Will and the Science of the Brain