Quotes from Michael S. Gazzaniga

One of a line of self-declared motor chauvinists, he boasts a lineage that includes the Nobel laureates Sir Charles Sherrington, who wrote, "Life's aim is an act, not a thought," and Roger Sperry, who encouraged us "to view the brain objectively for what it is, namely, a mechanism for governing motor activity."32 After all, it is action, not cogitation, that puts food on the table and a bun in the oven. Action allowed our ancestors to survive and reproduce.

Evolution by natural selection requires the copying of genetic records and the construction of proteins, but these processes themselves had to originate somehow.

Marc Kirschner and his Berkeley colleague John Gerhart.20 They wondered whether modern creatures have cellular and developmental mechanisms with the characteristic of what is called evolvability. That is, do they have the ability to generate heritable phenotypic variation? And is the characteristic of evolvability itself under selection pressure? That is, will biological systems that produce more phenotypic variations that can be passed on to their offspring be more

I am not suggesting that single cells are conscious. I am suggesting that they may have some type of processing that is necessary or similar to the processing that results in conscious experience.

I will argue that consciousness is not a thing. "Consciousness" is the word we use to describe the subjective feeling of a number of instincts and/or memories playing out in time in an organism. That is why "consciousness" is a proxy word for how a complex living organism operates. And, to understand how complex organisms work, we need to know how brains' parts are organized to deliver conscious experience as we know it.

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.

This incessant interplay between cognition and feelings, which is to say between cortical and subcortical modules, produces what we call consciousness.

24 It is worthwhile to take a moment to understand the difference between a structural and a functional network. "Structure" refers simply to the physical anatomy of a network: how many neurons, how they are arranged, their shape, and so forth. A functional network performs a certain function; it may have to do with speaking language, or it may have to do with understanding language. Importantly, the structure of a network does not reveal its function, or vice versa.

Plainly stated, I believe consciousness is an instinct.

What exactly is the role of the cerebral cortex in producing consciousness? The cortex expands the number of ways in which we can experience the world, which allows for a vast variety of possible conscious experiences and responses.

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.

The list is long, and we humans seem to have more instincts than other creatures.

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.

Living matter seems to be playing an entirely different game than non-living matter, even though they are both made from the same stuff. Why is living matter different from non-living matter? Is it simply cheating, somehow violating the physical laws that we've come to understand govern non-living matter? Pattee argues that living matter is distinguished from non-living matter by its ability to replicate and to evolve over the course of time. So what does it take to replicate and evolve?

It was also the test that produced the most astounding observation of all. The left, talking brain didn't seem to miss the right brain, and vice versa. It didn't just not miss it—it didn't even remember it or the functions it had performed, as if the right hemisphere had never existed. For me, this phenomenon is the single most important fact students of mind/brain research must take into account.

After a tour of the wards, it begins to look like consciousness is not a system property at all. It is a property of local brain circuits.

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.

While the list of chimp tricks is long and dazzling, does this make them conscious beings in the same sense that humans are conscious? This is probably an ill-posed question. Perhaps the question should be "Does our conscious experience hold similar contents to that of a chimp?

My mind takes flight like a butterfly. There is so much to do. You can wander off in space or in time, set out for Tierra del Fuego or for King Midas's court. You can visit the woman you love, slide down beside her and stroke her still-sleeping face. You can build castles in Spain, steal the Golden Fleece, discover Atlantis, realize your childhood dreams and adult ambitions.

How on earth does lifeless matter become the building blocks for living things? How do neurons turn into minds? What should be the vocabulary used to describe the interactions between the brain and its mind? When humankind finds some answers, will we be disheartened by what they are? Will our future understanding of "consciousness" simply not be fulfilling? Will it be simple yet cold and harsh?

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.

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.

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.

Autobiography is hopelessly inventive.