Michael Gazzaniga

Michael Gazzaniga
Born	(1939-12-12) December 12, 1939 Los Angeles, California, U.S.
Alma mater	Dartmouth College (BA) California Institute of Technology (PhD)
Known for	Split-brain research, cerebral lateralization, cognitive neuroscience
Awards	Elected to the National Academy of Sciences, honorary doctorate from Trinity College Dublin
Scientific career
Fields	Psychology, neuroscience
Institutions	University of California, Santa Barbara
Doctoral advisor	Roger Sperry
Doctoral students	Joseph E. LeDoux

Michael S. Gazzaniga (born December 12, 1939) is an American cognitive neuroscientist who is an emeritus professor of psychology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is the founder and retired director of the SAGE Center for the Study of the Mind at UCSB (2006–2023). He is a member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, the Institute of Medicine, and the National Academy of Sciences.

Biography

In 1961, Gazzaniga graduated from Dartmouth College with a B.A in Zoology. In 1964, he received a Ph.D. in psychobiology from the California Institute of Technology, where he carried out research on human split-brain patients for his doctoral thesis under Roger Sperry. In his subsequent work he has made important advances in our understanding of which functions are lateralized in the brain and how the left and right cerebral hemispheres communicate with one another.

Career

He has had a distinguished career in the field of cognitive neuroscience. In 1993, he founded the Cognitive Neuroscience Society, a professional organization dedicated to advancing the field. From 1988 to 2003, he served as the founding editor and editor-in-chief of the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience.

Gazzaniga's academic career began as an assistant professor of psychology at UCSB in 1967.

In 1969 he moved to New York University graduate school as an assistant professor, and in 1972 became a full professor. In 1973 he took a position as professor of psychology at the State University of New York at Stony Brook and later became a professor of social sciences in Medicine.

This led to Cornell University Medical College, where he was appointed Director of the Division of Cognitive Neuroscience and a Professor of Neurology and Psychology from 1977 to 1988.

In 2009, he delivered the Gifford Lectures on Mental Life at the University of Edinburgh. In 2019, Trinity College Dublin awarded him with an honorary doctorate.

Cultural influence

Gazzaniga's work is mentioned in the novel Peace on Earth by Stanisław Lem. It is also mentioned in Chapter 8 of Homo Deus by Yuval Noah Harari.

In 2010 a tribute volume to the work of Gazzaniga was published, containing contributions by Joseph LeDoux, Stephen Kosslyn, Steven Pinker and others.

Studies

Gazzaniga has led pioneering studies in learning and understanding split brained patients and how their brains work. He has performed numerous studies and done large amounts of research on split brain patients to provide a higher quality understanding into the lives of those affected by this rare phenomenon. He has studied how people who have the two halves of the brain separated function in comparison to those who do not. Gazzaniga has looked into what bodily functions are controlled by each half of the brain. He has looked at what split brained patients are able to do as a result of their condition such as the ability to draw two different objects with each hand, an ability that a person with a non-split brain is unable to do. They study how those with split brain act emotionally and physically in comparison to those who do not have a split brain. Through Gazzaniga’s studies a much greater understanding of the split brain phenomenon has been brought to other physiologists as well as the general population of the world.

Patient W.J.

Patient W.J. was a World War II paratrooper who got hit in the head with a rifle butt, after which he started having seizures. Before his operation to try to fix the seizures, Gazzaniga tested his brain functions. This included presenting stimuli to the left and right visual fields and identifying objects in his hands that were out of view. He was able to perform these tasks perfectly and afterwards he had the surgery that split his corpus callosum and anterior commissure. After his surgery, he was brought in again for testing with Gazzaniga in which stimuli such as letters and light bursts were flashed to the left and right visual fields. The stimuli flashed to the right visual field were processed by the brain’s left hemisphere, which contains the language center, so he was able to press a button to indicate he saw the stimulus and could verbally report what he had seen. However, when the stimuli were flashed to the left visual field, and thus the right hemisphere, he would press the button, but could not verbally report having seen anything. When they modified the experiment to have him point to the stimulus that was presented to his left visual field and not have to verbally identify it, he was able to perform this task accurately.

Patient W.J.’s divided corpus callosum could also cause conflicts between the hemispheres. An example of this could be seen with his hands, where each hand was controlled by the opposite hemisphere, and there was no communication between the two. This would result in moments where one hand might reach out to open a car door while the other would try to stop that hand from opening the door.

Patient P.S.

Patient P.S. was a teenage boy in whom it was shown that language comprehension was possible in the right hemisphere. When the word “girlfriend” was flashed to his left visual field, and thus his right hemisphere, he could not verbally say the name of his “crush”, but he then spelled out the name “Liz” with Scrabble tiles. This suggested that even though verbal language was not possible in the right hemisphere, there was a form of language possible through gesturing and left hand movements.

Publications

• Gazzaniga, Michael S. (1970). The Bisected Brain. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts. ISBN 978-0-390-35278-1.
• Gazzaniga, Michael S.; LeDoux, Joseph E. (1978). The Integrated Mind. New York: Plenum Pr. ISBN 978-0-306-31085-0.
• Gazzaniga, Michael S. (1987). Social Brain: Discovering the Networks of the Mind. Basic Books. ISBN 978-0-465-07850-9.
• Gazzaniga, Michael S. (1988). Mind Matters: How Mind and Brain Interact to Create our Conscious Lives. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. ISBN 978-0-395-50095-8.
• Gazzaniga, Michael S. (1992). Nature's Mind: The Biological Roots of Thinking, Emotions, Sexuality, Language and Intelligence. New York: BasicBooks. ISBN 978-0-465-04863-2.
• Gazzaniga, Michael S. (2000). The Mind's Past. Berkeley, Calif: University of California Press. ISBN 978-0-520-22486-5.
• Gazzaniga, Michael S. (2005). The Ethical Brain. New York [u.a.]: Dana Press. ISBN 978-1-932594-01-0.
• Senior, Carl; Russell, Tamara; Gazzaniga, Michael S. (2006). Methods in Mind (1st ed.). Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. ISBN 978-0-262-19541-6.
• Gazzaniga, Michael S.; Ivry, Richard B.; Mangun, George R. (2009). Cognitive Neuroscience: The Biology of the Mind (3rd ed.). New York: W.W. Norton. ISBN 978-0-393-92795-5.
• Gazzaniga, Michael S. (2009). Human: The Science Behind What Makes Us Unique (1st ed.). New York: Harper Perennial. ISBN 978-0-06-089289-0.
• Gazzaniga, Michael S. (2011). Who's in Charge?: Free Will and the Science of the Brain (1st ed.). New York, NY: Ecco. ISBN 978-0-06-190610-7.
• Gazzaniga, Michael S. (2015). Tales from Both Sides of the Brain: A Life in Neuroscience (1st ed.). New York, NY: Ecco. ISBN 978-0062228802.
• Gazzaniga, Michael S. (2018). The Consciousness Instinct: Unraveling the Mystery of How the Brain Makes the Mind (1st ed.). New York, NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. ISBN 978-0374715502.

See also

• Attentional shift
• Split-brain
• Left-brain interpreter
• Lateralization of brain function
• Brain asymmetry
• Laterality
• Bicameral mentality
• Society of Mind
• Dual consciousness
• Divided consciousness
• Alien hand syndrome

External links

• University of California Santa Barbara faculty web page
• Michael Gazzaniga’s personal web page
• The Law and Neuroscience Project
• Sage Center for the Study of the Mind
• "The Effects of Crack" — an exchange between Gazzaniga and the conservative commentator William F. Buckley, Jr.
• Video of Gazzaniga demonstrating the effects of split brain surgery
• Video (and audio) of interview/discussion with Gazzaniga by Carl Zimmer on Bloggingheads.tv
• Appearances on C-SPAN