Tales from Both Sides of the Brain Quotes

“Science results from a profoundly social process. The common portrayal—that science emerges from a solitary isolated genius, always laboring alone, not owing anything to anyone—is simply wrong.”
― Michael S. Gazzaniga, Tales from Both Sides of the Brain: A Life in Neuroscience

“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.”
― Michael S. Gazzaniga, Tales from Both Sides of the Brain: A Life in Neuroscience

“the study of psychophysics proves that it is impossible to bore a German.” Thankfully,”
― Michael S. Gazzaniga, Tales from Both Sides of the Brain: A Life in Neuroscience

“We live in the era of the “bottom line” mentality, with TED talks, sound bites, and news summaries. There is so much information to digest, we can only hope to grasp the world with compact and seemingly complete stories. We don’t want to be left dangling.
We are all suckers for this information diet, and we all have come to depend on it, just like we have all succumbed to the instant gratification of texting and cell phones. And yet what separates the dilettante from the sophisticate is the appreciation that everything is not simple. The trick seems to be able to talk clearly while remaining fully aware of the underlying complexity of any story. For me it is the overwhelming realization that when trying to figure out how the brain does its masterful trick of
enabling minds, we are barely at the starting line. Dig as deep as you want into human history: As long as there is a written record of thought, there is a record of humans wondering about the nature of life. It becomes obvious that all of us are just hopping into an ongoing conversation, not structuring one with a beginning, a middle, and an end. Humans may have discovered some of the constraints on the thought processes, but we have not yet been able to tell the full story.”
― Michael S. Gazzaniga, Tales from Both Sides of the Brain: A Life in Neuroscience

“At the end of the visit Steve asked, "What percent of the work is exciting?" After thinking for a moment, I replied, "Oh about ten percent. The rest is routine." As I have learned in life, 10 percent is a good number for most professions. I know it has been enough to keep me going to work every day with a smile on my face.”
― Michael S. Gazzaniga, Tales from Both Sides of the Brain: A Life in Neuroscience

“George grinned and observed that success is always grounded in simply asking the right question”
― Michael S. Gazzaniga, Tales from Both Sides of the Brain: A Life in Neuroscience

“He once told me he didn’t like to meet people he admired because they invariably disappointed in person.”
― Michael S. Gazzaniga, Tales from Both Sides of the Brain: A Life in Neuroscience

“Adding to our understanding of why the brain seems undisturbed by disconnections was not only the notion that it was, in a sense, sending half its decisions into the realm of the unconscious; it was also the discovery of the “interpreter.” This special left brain system kept note of all the behaviors that resulted from the many mental systems. It appeared to be the surveillance camera on our behavior, which, of course, was the evidence that a mental or cognitive act had occurred. The interpreter not only took note; it tried to make “sense” out of the behavior by keeping a running narrative going on about why a string of behaviors was occurring. It is a precious device and most likely uniquely human. It is working in us all the time as we try to explain why we like something or have a particular opinion, or rationalize something we have done. It is the interpreter device that takes the inputs from the massively modularized and automatic brain of ours and creates order from chaos. It comes up with the “makes sense” explanation that leads us to believe in a certain form of essentialism, that is, that we are a unified conscious agent. Nice try, interpreter!”
― Michael S. Gazzaniga, Tales from Both Sides of the Brain: A Life in Neuroscience

“After my talk, he went into some kind of rant about how the “odd human case” didn’t mean much of anything and that it was sort of a bizarre consequence of prior epilepsy, etcetera.”
― Michael S. Gazzaniga, Tales from Both Sides of the Brain: A Life in Neuroscience

“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.”
― Michael S. Gazzaniga, Tales from Both Sides of the Brain: A Life in Neuroscience

“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.”
― Michael S. Gazzaniga, Tales from Both Sides of the Brain: A Life in Neuroscience

“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.”
― Michael S. Gazzaniga, Tales from Both Sides of the Brain: A Life in Neuroscience

“Or really, the question is: Is there a difference between when life begins and when life as a human begins?”
― Michael S. Gazzaniga, Tales from Both Sides of the Brain: A Life in Neuroscience

“When this was done on normal subjects, the brain answered back with the N400 brain wave response when the word was incongruous, but not when it was congruous.”
― Michael S. Gazzaniga, Tales from Both Sides of the Brain: A Life in Neuroscience

“When you hear a good joke, this is the system that kicks in and produces the giggly face.”
― Michael S. Gazzaniga, Tales from Both Sides of the Brain: A Life in Neuroscience

“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.”
― Michael S. Gazzaniga, Tales from Both Sides of the Brain: A Life in Neuroscience

“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.”
― Michael S. Gazzaniga, Tales from Both Sides of the Brain: A Life in Neuroscience

“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”
― Michael S. Gazzaniga, Tales from Both Sides of the Brain: A Life in Neuroscience

“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.”
― Michael S. Gazzaniga, Tales from Both Sides of the Brain: A Life in Neuroscience

“Festinger was the intellectually intense discoverer of “cognitive dissonance,” the idea that when a personal belief is challenged by new information, we tend to ignore the new information in order to reduce mental conflict.”
― Michael S. Gazzaniga, Tales from Both Sides of the Brain: A Life in Neuroscience

“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.”
― Michael S. Gazzaniga, Tales from Both Sides of the Brain: A Life in Neuroscience

“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.”
― Michael S. Gazzaniga, Tales from Both Sides of the Brain: A Life in Neuroscience