Quotes from Michael S. Gazzaniga

He once told me he didn't like to meet people he admired because they invariably disappointed in person.

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.

George grinned and observed that success is always grounded in simply asking the right question

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.

Or really, the question is: Is there a difference between when life begins and when life as a human begins?

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

Hence at any moment only part of the visual elements of a scene is available for conscious perception.

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.

When you hear a good joke, this is the system that kicks in and produces the giggly face.

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.

We don't learn to talk, as most think. We start to talk when our brain is good and ready to say something.

Libet has provided us with an intriguing possible mechanism for explaining why we think we are doing in real time things that we have in fact already done.

So before you are aware that you're thinking about moving your arm, your brain is at work preparing to make that movement!