III - THE INTERVIEWS
Chapter 13
Michael Gazzaniga: The Brain Whisperer (Jan 2015)
Michael Gazzaniga: The Brain Whisperer (Jan 2015)
Later that month, I had the pleasure of meeting with Michal Gazzaniga in his beautiful house overlooking the Pacific Ocean, just south of Santa Barbara where he directs the SAGE Center for the Study of the Mind. I knew that he was going to be one of the bigger names I would interview for my film (even Coricelli admitted that Gazzaniga was one of his heroes), so I was particularly eager to make the most of it.
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Gazzaniga is famous for leading pioneering studies on split brained patients – these are people whose corpus callosum, the part of the brain that connects the two hemispheres, is to some degree severed (often as the result of surgery to treat epilepsy). Having studied how these individuals function on specific tasks compared to people whose brains are functioning "normally," he discovered many of the specific attributes of the left and right hemispheres respectively. One of the most interesting findings, postulated by Gazzaniga and his colleague Roger Sperry who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1981, is the presence of an “interpreter” module in the left hemisphere. In his early experiments, Gazzaniga observed what happened when the two hemispheres of such split-brained patients could not communicate with each-other: when patients were shown an image only to their right eye (which is processed in the left hemisphere), they were able to provide an explanation for what they were looking at; however, when they were shown an image only to their left eye (which is processed in the right hemisphere), they were unable to account for what they were seeing. This is how Gazzaniga first postulated that the left brain had the unique ability to build an explanation for the information that was being fed to it, something which the right hemisphere was unable to do by itself.
This “interpreter module” was subsequently shown to apply to almost every aspect of life, leading Gazzaniga and his colleagues to define much more precisely how it works and what its use is. In the larger scope of things, the “interpreter” is essentially the little narrator of our lives, the editor that conjures up reasons and explanations for events and ties everything together so that the chain of experiences that constitutes one’s life not only seems singular but makes sense, reconciling the past and the present to provide continuity. Further research showed that the left hemisphere is far more inventive in interpreting past events than the right brain, which is more literal and true to the facts. Gazzaniga admitted that our sense of free will was quite probably a direct product of the interpreter: when something happens, the interpreter looks for why it happened and often the easiest, most obvious explanation to give is that it was us. Projecting the past into the future, the interpreter builds us up as free agents in control of decisions and determining which path we proceed upon, shaping the world as we go along and having a consequential effect on our own destiny. |
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Another interesting aspect of Gazzaniga’s work is that, being a cognitive neuroscientist, he has sought to understand the relationship between “mind” (a word used to describe the high-order mental abilities coupled with the subjective sense of self) and “brain” (the crude, physical organ, made up of grey matter, neurons and synapses). From our conversation, I think he suspects the mind is an emergent property of the brain that operates at a “higher level” than its constituent parts, much like software running on the hardware of the brain. And he postulates that our inability to explain “mind” from “brain” is precisely the consequence of its immense complexity, using the analogy of traffic: no amount of absolute knowledge and understanding of how deterministically a car works in its most intricate mechanical and technological details will allow us to predict traffic. In other words, traffic is an emergent property that is not reducible to its constituent parts, cars. This concept of emergence appealed to me. It seemed to be a scientifically viable framework to explain the more subjective aspects of consciousness without sounding kooky. Tegmark has a similar thought on this matter, claiming that “wetness” is an emergent property of H20 in its liquid form, without being reducible to the constituent molecule which, in other patterns, can be icy or gaseous. The big question, however, with this idea of emergence, is whether the emergent level has any downward causal influence on its constituent parts. Gazzaniga himself admitted that this remained a question mark and identified it as one of the major fields of inquiry for the future of neuroscience.
Towards the end of the interview, when I asked Gazzaniga about his own life and regrets, he looked up, racking his brain, and eventually replied as though the answer was obvious and the question silly: “I don’t do regrets!” I laughed and didn’t insist. “I don’t do regrets,” he said. Does that mean that he chooses not to have regrets? Can we choose to be regretful or not? Is he suggesting that it’s somewhat silly to have regrets? I should have asked him that. Facing his legitimately joyful satisfaction with his own life, I couldn’t help but think that perhaps he had no regrets because he simply had no reason to have any. By all accounts, he had been successful in every aspect of his life: he had made breakthrough discoveries in his field of expertise, contributing in a meaningful way to human knowledge, he was recognized and respected by his peers as the father of cognitive neuroscience, he had raised a large family, was still happily married and had built the beautiful house we were sitting in. Who would be unhappy? Truth be told, perhaps that kind of success in all walks of life, for someone else, would still not be enough. He had the wisdom to harbor this positive, satisfied mindset with the life he has led, completely unperturbed by what could have been if he had done things differently. He did concede, though, that his success had originally hinged on one rather fortuitous coincidence: it just so happened that one of his first jobs was in a facility where he came into contact with his first split-brain patient, thus leading him on the path of his famous research. Had that split-brain patient not been there in that facility at that time, perhaps Gazzaniga’s career would have gone very differently. He didn't seem phased though, and this was perhaps an insight worth drawing too: if you are lucky in your life, you don't need to feel unworthy or apologetic about it, just be grateful and spread a positive attitude, which he definitely did with me.
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