Quotes from Michael S. Gazzaniga

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.

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?

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.

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.

the study of psychophysics proves that it is impossible to bore a German." Thankfully

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.

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.

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.

The arts are not frosting but baking soda.

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.

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.

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.

Unfortunately, even though Thomas Nagel would love it, technology today does not permit us to truly understand how different organisms experience the world. Often it is even difficult for us to understand our own perception of the world. The best we can do to empirically understand the experience of others, both animals and people, is to use behavioral and brain-activity measurements.

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.

some types of neurons may be found only in specific species.

stimulation of the medial frontal cortex gives one the feeling of the urge to move

When communication between the hemispheres is lost, each is unaware of the other's knowledge and each functions independently based on the information it receives. Both sides of the brain try to complete the task independently, resulting in the tug-of-war. By this simple task, the illusion of a unified consciousness is exposed. Clearly, if consciousness arose from a single location, then a split-brain patient would be unable to have two simultaneous experiences!

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.

The similarity of architecture in organized, complex systems suggests that they all share universal requirements. They are designed to be "efficient, adaptive, evolvable, and robust.

Possessing a theory of mind means that an individual ascribes mental states, such as purpose, intention, knowledge, beliefs, doubts, pretending, liking, and so forth, to himself and to others.

First, we contend that conscious or mental phenomena are dynamic, emergent, pattern (or configurational) properties of the living brain in action—

Shitij Kapur, a psychiatrist, neuroscientist, and professor at King's College London, distinguishes for us the difference between hallucinations and delusions: "Hallucinations reflect a direct experience of the aberrant salience of internal representations," whereas delusions (false beliefs) are the result of "a cognitive effort by the patient to make sense of these aberrantly salient experiences.

According to Panksepp, seven primal emotional and motivational feelings that appear to be common features of animal and human consciousness at both a behavioral and a neural level are SEEKING, FEAR, RAGE, LUST, CARE, GRIEF, and PLAY.

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.