Still, this lengthy response time (30 milliseconds) didn’t make any sense. We knew from physiological studies that it should take only 0.5 milliseconds for a nerve to conduct a message across the callosum. Why were our behavioral measures so slow, and if they were that slow, why didn’t we sense it in some way in our own experience? We did one more run at it. Instead of requesting our undergraduates to say “yes” or “no” to the flashed dots and blanks, we instructed them to respond with their right hand on a lever that was to be pushed one way for a “yes” response and the other way for a “no” response. Changing the experiment in this way might reveal that we were not dealing with a transfer time from one hemisphere to the other, but with the simple fact that the right hemisphere was slower than the left when asked to respond to even simple tasks.
Well, the undergraduates gave a clear answer to the experiment, which continues to puzzle researchers to this day. The manual response to a “dot” was equally fast when the right hand was responding, no matter in which visual field it appeared. This suggested that each hemisphere could organize a motor response equally fast. What was surprising, however, was that it took 40 milliseconds longer for the hand to respond to a “blank” trial. Wherever in the brain the decision to respond was being made, it took longer for both hemispheres to report that a “blank” trial had occurred. Perhaps it took longer for a brain to decide that nothing had happened than that something had. Maybe we were not getting at the crux of the matter after all. That happens in science. It happens most of the time.
Thankfully, others have worked on this problem and made real progress. In fact, an entire Italian research team worked on it, led by Berlucchi.10 Indeed, we continue to work on the problem of how the two half brains coordinate their activity and functions. While it seems on the surface to be a split-brain specific issue, it is really dealing with one of the central issues in brain research: How do parts of the brain interact with other parts? As the late comedian Henny Youngman would say, “Timing is everything.” In the brain, usually the parts are only a few microns away from each other or a few centimeters. In both cases, local processes have to conduct their business and then either send or somehow coordinate the information with another part of the brain. Asking how this works between the hemispheres gives the researcher a bit of breathing room, as the physical distances between processing sites are very far apart.
DAVID PREMACK AND HIS FORTY-YEAR-OLD QUESTION
In Santa Barbara many new lines of research were born and more lifelong friendships were established. One of my closest lifelong friendships has been with David Premack, and it began there (Figure 14). It is difficult to think of a living psychologist more influential than he has been. When we consider our origins, our history, our uniqueness as humans, it is Premack who has been our best guide in the understanding of who we are. As Liz Spelke, the distinguished Harvard psychologist, once told me, “Oh, Dave discovered everything first.”
FIGURE 14. David Premack, a true creative genius, with one of his friends. Through his research on animals, Premack changed how we think about the mind.
(Courtesy of Ann Premack)
Before his pioneering work on the cognitive and the “possible” language capacities of the chimpanzee, Dave made fundamental insights into the nature of motivation.11 Behaviorism had developed the view that animals were motivated by external contingencies, a view that failed to consider that animals might have internal states and preferences. He turned the entire view about the nature of reinforcement on its ear by looking beyond what was easily observable. Using the methods of science, he unearthed the underlying principles of what motivates living creatures to act.
He tested these principles by challenging the minds of chimps and, in particular, a chimp named Sarah. I know, since she lived down the hall from my office for years. I don’t care for chimpanzees. I have always found them too aggressive and bestial and, quite frankly, would walk in the other direction when Sarah approached with her trainer, Mary, or with David.
Even so, Sarah was no ordinary chimp. She was exceptionally smart and engaging. She was also volatile. Dave perfectly managed her by being even more unpredictable and clever than she had ever seen a human be. This was one Homo sapiens who always beat her at her own game. Dave had established a social relationship with her, and then began to use it to explore exactly what was, and was not, in and on Sarah’s mind. At that time, Dave was beginning to clarify the intellectual limits of our closest living relative, and in doing so, he began to unearth the factors that make humans unique.
Premack’s work did not go unnoticed by the University of Pennsylvania. Before I knew it, David and his wife, Ann, were on a plane with Sarah, headed to Honey Brook, Pennsylvania. A chimp facility was being specially built in Amish country to house the chimps for his research. It was there, with the help of Sarah and a small group of young chimps, that Dave gave birth to the idea of “theory of mind,” one of the major ideas of twentieth-century psychology. TOM, as it is called, reflects the ability of one’s mind to attribute mental states, such as beliefs and desires, not only to oneself (I believe cats are devious) but to others (he wants to get a dog). So we may have a theory about what a chimp and our dog believe and desire (I think that Fido wants to play ball), but do a chimp and a dog have a theory about our beliefs and desires? (Does Fido think for a moment that I am sick of throwing the ball?) Does the chimp have a theory about other chimps? Does it understand that others have thoughts, beliefs, and desires and some primitive understanding of what they themselves are? As in all breakthroughs, it is the ingenuity of the question that makes the impact. This is another Premack specialty. Dave has the rare ability to “turn an issue on its ear.” The question of whether or not an animal could have a theory about humans (or anything else) did exactly that. He changed our perspective and opened up a wealth of research on animals, children, and various neurologic syndromes. While an argument rages on in the animal research literature about the capacity of chimps, or orangutans or dogs for that matter, it is clear they don’t have much theory of mind, and certainly not to the degree that humans do. It should come as no surprise, therefore, that this question would have a huge effect on me and how I was to think about issues in the next phase of my own work.
PICNICKIN’ WITH STEVE ALLEN
One dimension of working for a university that is missing from a medical school or a place like Caltech is that one has the duty to teach undergraduates. Some people thrive on these assignments and are truly brilliant at the task; some are not drawn to it and are uninspiring. Still others find it takes too much time away from their research. I fit into the latter category. It is true that by teaching, one comes to understand a topic more deeply, especially topics about which one has only a passing interest, but when one is committed to a particular area of research, most topics are of that kind.
Once I was established as an assistant professor, I had Psychology I duty (introductory psychology). Almost one thousand students showed up three times a week for class at the university’s largest auditorium, Campbell Hall. A bit of crowd control and mass motivation are required when the numbers are this big. In short, one has to keep the students interested and motivated and entertained. Doing it three times a week was grueling. Like everyone I know who teaches these large courses, one seeks some kind of relief—movies, guest lecturers, and more. I had an idea to have a guest lecturer to beat all guest lecturers, my new best friend, Steve Allen. So I called Steve and asked if he would like to come up and give a lecture . . . gratis. He accepted in a flash. The lecture was at 8 A.M., so he drove up the night before, stayed at a motel near the University, and showed up bright and early.
We had agreed he should talk about the creative process. Steve was a man of many talents, songwriting being one of them. Sitting at the piano I had had moved into the lecture hall, he told the story of what was behind his greatest hit, “Picnic,” the theme song from the movie of the same name. Steve had written the lyrics in record time after rece
iving a call from the producer. As he looked back on it, he basically came up with what a psychologist would call a “resource allocation” model for creativity. Usually, he said, he would be asked to write a song with absolutely no constraints put on the assignment. For the song “Picnic,” however, the producer said, “I want you to write the lyrics to the theme for our movie, which stars William Holden and Kim Novak, and they will be dancing at a picnic.” As Steve pointed out, all his energies became focused on the task at hand, and it was quickly accomplished. In contrast, in the unconstrained situation, so much energy is lost trying to define the context and idea for a song, one is depleted by the time the actual task is under way. It is much more effortful and takes longer.
While the visit was a terrific success, it underscores how complex life as a teacher and researcher truly is on a day-to-day basis. Preparing for a lecture, if it is to be any good, takes time. Doing good research takes time. The two enterprises invariably clash. Sperry used to complain about it and always told the story about what Karl Lashley, one of his famous mentors, had told him during his postdoctoral years at Harvard. “Don’t teach. But if you have to teach, teach neuroanatomy. It never changes.”
Of course, there are some colleagues who possess incredible verbal memories and have an easy verbal fluency that finds them talking all the time. Teaching is no big deal for such people because the entire day is one big verbal flow, interrupted by demarcations of time called “class.” It is easy for them. For others, it is a challenge. To this day, I find teaching grueling. A few years ago, when I was asked to prepare six consecutive lectures for the Gifford Lectures Series at the University of Edinburgh, I worked for two years to get them ready. How did I ever do three a week?
SHARING RESOURCES: THE HEART OF SCIENCE
On the scientific side of the Santa Barbara ledger, I received a call one day from a graduate student at Berkeley who wanted to test a split-brain patient on a visual task. Little did I realize it would turn into another lifelong friendship and instigate a new tradition in the lab. The student was Colin Blakemore, now professor of neuroscience at Oxford, as well as at University College London. He and another student had an idea about seeing depth at the visual midline. I invited him down to Santa Barbara, where he set up his gear and tested N.G. This is how it goes in science. A story gets going on how things work. Slowly, with lots of people contributing, it gets added to bit by bit. In this case, Mitchell and Blakemore showed how important cortical connections were to the integration of information isolated in each hemisphere that was responsible for seeing depth at the center of the human gaze.12 Our early reports on W.J. were being expanded upon, while also illuminating an observation of crucial interest to the specialized field of visual science. The importance of pathways, of discrete neural fiber systems for transferring information around the human brain, had begun to develop.
This very positive experience inaugurated what became a long tradition of bringing outside scientists to our labs. Split-brain patients were a precious resource for understanding brain mechanisms. While surgical medicine was helping people’s lives, we were helping people in a different way by trying to understand how the human brain worked. Clearly, we didn’t have all the good ideas. The Mitchell and Blakemore studies became classic. It is the duty of scientists to facilitate good science.
I continued to work out more details of how one hemisphere could control the ipsilateral hand.13 Moving from ideas generated by the human work, I could test specific mechanisms in the monkey and vice versa. By the time I had left Caltech, it had been fairly well established that cross-cueing was a powerful mechanism. Tests on split-brain monkeys and human patients made it clear that cross-cueing strategies could overcome elimination of the major neural communication pathway between the two hemispheres. It is the neurobiologic equivalent of people of whom it is said (and it is said of me): “If you throw him out the front door, he will come back in through the window.” During the Santa Barbara years, several more studies on monkeys and the patients confirmed this important idea. Block any way the brain communicates with its modules, and it will most likely find another strategy to achieve the goal at hand.
Life was good. Then, suddenly, I was asked by the senior leadership in the department if I would serve as chair. “What?” I exclaimed. Yes, they all said, we have promoted you to tenure and associate professor after only two years on the faculty. They told me Sperry and other Caltech faculty, such as James Bonner, had written me grand letters, and UCSB had approved the departmental request. I was enthusiastically encouraged to take on the task by all the elements of the department and, in fact, was wooed into accepting the job.
Now that I was tenured, I had to do my share of administrative work. Robert Zajonc, the late distinguished social psychologist at the University of Michigan, once told me that he had successfully avoided administration for thirty years. Finally, out of some sense of gratitude, he took over as director of the Institute for Social Research. “Mike,” he said, “it is amazing how right in front of your eyes, friends you have had for thirty years become assholes.” He nailed it, and it certainly was true at Santa Barbara. Senior friends of mine would come into the chair’s office, close the door, and start twisting my arm for this or that. In many ways it was hilarious, and is made even more so with the distance of time.
Of course, on the fun side, when one takes those positions, little pots of money can be found and applied to good academic causes. I found some funds and arranged to hire Donald M. MacKay, the distinguished neurophysiologist/physicist and student of the mind/brain problem. His home base was the University of Keele, in the United Kingdom, and he was extremely popular with the American neuroscience community. He had written widely on a model of the brain that suggested that even though the brain was as mechanical as clockwork, as he put it, there was still free will.14 He and Sperry had a running but cordial argument about the issue.
At any rate, I brought him out to UCSB for a few months. It is hard for me to lavish enough personal praise on Donald and his wife, Valerie, as well. We rented a house for him and his family on a sunny hillside that was equipped with a glistening swimming pool. Our families would meet there for barbecues, and one day in particular, Valerie noticed my oldest daughter, Marin, was at the bottom of the pool! Thankfully, Valerie saw her and jumped in and basically saved her life. Accidents happen in a flash, and since then, I have become vigilant whenever kids are around.
When one goes to the extra effort to create a more interesting intellectual community than the status quo, one wonders if it is worth it. Convincing people to think about matters outside their specific interests is a battle and always has been. Fortunately, people who enjoy doing this tend to find each other. To my enormous surprise, the MacKay lecture series brought up to UCSB a young philosopher from the University of California, Irvine, Daniel Dennett, who has become one of the world’s great intellectuals. Dan’s lifelong interest in free will surely was encouraged by those talks. He drove up for the lectures and, as it turned out, we too have become lifelong friends. All of these seeds count, and they all add up. Fifty years later, I gave a talk at the Vatican on the subject of free will, and it featured the work of MacKay, Dennett, and Sperry.15
Feeling my oats and finding other funds to spend, I brought in other famous neuroscientists, such as Brenda Milner, from Montreal (who was the first to study H.M., the most famous memory patient in cognitive neuroscience), and Hans-Lukas Teuber, the charismatic head of brain research at MIT and the founder of its brain and cognitive sciences department.
Linda and I had moved from the tract house that Cliff Morgan helped us buy to a new redwood house on Mission Creek. It was unfinished but gorgeous when we bought it, and we finished it ourselves, calling upon family and friends for help in design and construction. It turned out to be a magnificent tree house sort of thing, with vaulted ceilings, surrounded by fresh redwood paneling, brick, rock, and glass. It was the perfect house for parties, and parties we gave. One of the f
irst was for Teuber. Being the natural pedagogue that he was, he took me into my bedroom, sat me down on our bed, whipped out a manuscript I had submitted to the journal he had helped start, and gave me a lesson in editing! Hearing the clinking of glasses out in the living room along with much laughter, I remember thinking to myself, I thought I worked hard. I am punk.
In June 1968, Robert Kennedy was assassinated in Los Angeles. I was taking a shower in the unfinished part of our house and my wife ran in very upset and agitated with the news. Her command was “You have to do something!” Having met RFK a few years earlier at Caltech, I found this news especially wrenching. I quickly realized I could do something, and sure enough those extra funds were helpful once again. I put together a quick meeting on the nature of violence, calling upon some new friends and some old friends. I called Leon Festinger, my budding new friend. He called his best friend, Stanley Schachter at Columbia, and Ken Colby at Stanford. They called their friend Paul Meehl, at the University of Minnesota, who agreed to come because their friend and former student, Dave Premack, my colleague, would be there, too. I also called Bob Sinshemier, who was chair of biology at Caltech.
While there was some ribbing about Leon engineering a meeting at my expense to see his old friends, the event itself probably hooked me on the value of getting smart people in one space and letting them chew on almost any topic. I didn’t realize it at the time, but I was putting together my first interdisciplinary forum. Seeing a truly distinguished molecular biologist, Sinsheimer, and the whiz computer scientist Colby, who was also a psychiatrist, discuss societal issues of violence with social psychologists changed the game for me. Not only did it reveal a new level of conversation that I loved and have sought ever since—and from which I learned that it is only the really smart people who let everything be put on the table—but it also revealed how productive interdisciplinary discussions can be.
Tales from Both Sides of the Brain : A Life in Neuroscience (9780062228819) Page 11
