Tales from Both Sides of the Brain : A Life in Neuroscience (9780062228819)

by Gazzaniga, Michael S.

  My interest in public affairs continued to grow. In the spring of 1969, I wrote an op-ed for the Los Angeles Times on the problem of crime prevention.16 The Santa Barbara meeting on violence had pulled together some telling points that seemed to be worth repeating to the public. Stan Schachter had reminded the group that roughly 60 percent of felons returned to crime after serving in prison. Nothing seemed to change that number. David Premack had reminded us about the nature of reinforcement and punishment: These were not discrete categories, they were on a continuum. One man’s punishment may not be another’s. Did the 60 percent who returned to prison not find the experience so aversive? The trick would be to find a punishment that worked for each individual person. When you think about this scheme, it is value free. Look at a group of one thousand people. Some start to engage in antisocial behavior. The goal to constrain them should not have at its core the idea of retribution and justice. The goal should be to pick a punishment that reduces the frequency of the antisocial behavior. It’s a big idea that, to this day, continues to be battled over in the legal and scientific community.

  The op-ed piece caught the eye of none other than the former governor of California, Pat Brown. Soon I was dining with him at the Beverly Hills Hotel, which was next to his Los Angeles law offices. He invited me down to discuss the whole idea and by the end of the lunch had asked me to take over a floundering book project he had launched with his ex–press agent. The book was all about law and order and Pat’s historic role in those issues as district attorney, attorney general, and then governor of California. As I took on Pat’s book project, the winds of change once again began blowing my way.*

  PART 2

  HEMISPHERES TOGETHER AND APART

  CHAPTER 4

  UNMASKING MORE MODULES

  What is a friend? A single soul dwelling in two bodies.

  —ARISTOTLE

  IT WAS STILL EARLY DAYS IN THE WORLD OF SPLIT-BRAIN RESEARCH. The basic findings were now well reported, and the early buzz was that, following a relatively simple neurosurgical procedure, two minds, each with its own set of controls, could exist in one brain. The dramatic disconnection effects had held up for years. Activities isolated to the right hemisphere were unquestionably independent and outside the realm of awareness of the left hemisphere. Clear, clean, and simple. It was the talk of cocktail parties around the world.

  Looking back with the benefit of time, the curse of present knowledge rears its head. We all now know about left brain/right brain thinking. We are almost bored with it, just as we become bored with often played tunes. What gets lost is that, at the time, it was a huge deal, in large part because of the then current revolution in psychology. The ideological backbone of American psychology, behaviorism, was dying a slow death, and intellectual centers across the country from Harvard to Caltech were waking up to the fact that cognition and the mind itself could be studied. Behind much of this thinking was Lashley and his stance that mental properties could be studied by examining the neurophysiological processes of the brain.1 He adopted the term neuropsychology, which in his day meant the brain processes of the normal brain rather than the dysfunction of the brain due to lesions or injury. Ironically, he liked Akelaitis’s finding that cutting the callosum seemingly did nothing to disrupt the brain, because, in Lashley’s view, it was the “whole” brain that created the mind, not particular parts. Even though he helped launch the modern fields of psychobiology and neuroscience, which are dominant fields today, he would have been stunned with the basic “split-brain” findings of two minds in one head.

  There was no getting around it; the new work on split-brain humans was haunting. Our most precious sense of life is our very own private subjective experience—that feeling of my mind, which is what we all mean when we think about minds. We all think we each have one, and I mean one. To suddenly think it can be divided, that two minds are coexisting in one cranium, is almost not comprehensible. To think W.J. had two minds gazing out at the world, two listening and two thinking about others—indeed, two thinking about me—was unsettling. The uneasiness we feel about the idea of having two or even multiple subjective states may well have been what led us to our discovery, years later, of the “interpreter,” the special device in our left brain that gives our actions one narrative and the sense that we have but one mind.

  It was also clear that the right hemisphere and the left hemisphere did different things. The left hemisphere was chock full of speech and language processes. While the right seemed mute and language impoverished, it was able to do some fancy visual tasks. Those findings gave birth to “mind left” and “mind right” thinking, and suddenly everybody was a neurologist at those cocktail parties. And, again, it was simple: The left did this and the right did that. The brain seemed simple and organized in big, functional units that were managed by specific regions of itself. The idea took off like wildfire.

  By 1969, it was also clear that the two half brains could develop clever ways to interact, making it look like the hemispheres were not disconnected at all. The brain was like an old couple who had lived together for years and finally worked out a way to live together yet be separate. This made it difficult to do the research. We wanted to understand how the brain was truly organized, not just how it had figured out behavioral strategies for seeming connected and integrated. At the same time it was becoming apparent to me that it was in those strategies that we would learn something basic about how the brain was organized. It was the brain’s catch-22. We had to be as wily as the brains we were studying. It forced us to be constantly vigilant for its tricks and to continually think up new ways to investigate the patients.

  It was during this time that the simple descriptions of brain function were beginning to lose their appeal to me. If the right brain was a separate mental system with at least some language, why didn’t people who suffered aphasia following left-brain damage recover more readily and easily? In short, why didn’t mind right cover for mind left, just like the left or right kidney covers for the other if damaged? I knew that if I was going to make any headway on this question, I needed to start being associated with a medical center that saw a wide range of neurological patients.

  Stepping onto the next lily pad in life is always hard, especially when the current one is holding up just fine. The tug-of-war between taking risks to do something new and staying with the tried-and-true seemed ever present. While I think all of us usually prime ourselves for new possibilities, it is others who bring them to us. In the midst of all this work and rumination, I had been offered a job at New York University.

  EAST COAST FEVER

  One sunny spring morning in Santa Barbara, I was sitting with Leon Festinger on my redwood deck, surrounded by oak trees and boulders, soaking up the beauty of Mission Canyon. . . . Leon, who had just decided to move to New York City, said to me, “You know, people feel differently about living in New York. Some think it is like Paris, and others think it is like hell.” Unable to contain myself while he went on about New York, I said, “But Leon, what do you think of this house?” He looked around, noting all the fine woodworking, the lofty ceilings, the stone fireplace, the magnificent setting, and said, “Well, if you wanted this sort of thing in Manhattan, it would cost millions of dollars.” Somehow, between his wit and his flattering interest in me, he managed to set the hook. I thought to myself, He takes risks. He is moving from Stanford to the New School for Social Research. So, why can’t I?

  It was time to go east to escape the clutches of Southern California. Leon was the draw, New York was the unknown, and what the future would bring was anybody’s guess. Sperry had made it increasingly clear through various surrogates that he didn’t want me testing the Caltech patients anymore. While unhappy about that, I understood in a way. He was kicking me out of the extended nest and letting others have their day. In the end I thought that was reasonable, and away we went: We sold my redwood palace, packed up, and moved to New York.

  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. Leon and I had taken an instant liking to one another a year earlier at his home in Palo Alto, where he held his Stanford graduate seminars. He’d called out of the blue and wanted to know about my research. That meant I would give a talk to him and his class, which he always held in his living room. Leon stuck me in a chair at the front of his living room, sat right next to me, chain-smoking his ever-present Camels, and started to query me on each point of my research. When Leon moved into a new field, he wanted to know everything in detail. He was a fearless explorer of new intellectual territory. In the years that followed, he switched again to the field of archaeology and prehistory. At the time of his death, he was working on the impact of the introduction of technology on medieval societies. I was right behind him on all of these topics, always amazed at his erudition and energy. It was like having your own personal scholar opening for you vast horizons for thought and analysis.

  It would be difficult to imagine two more different people—we had different philosophies, different styles, different aspirations, and were of different generations. Our enduring friendship developed around a mutual love for good ideas, good food and drink, and lively conversation. Once we both moved east, we were surrounded by the magic of New York, which included the élan of scientists like Festinger and my political buddy, Buckley. With these intellectual giants, everything was always on the table. Parochialism and simplistic zealotry were to be checked at the door. When it wasn’t, my eyes learned to glaze over. As Walt Whitman observed:

  Lives of great men all remind us

  We can make our lives sublime. . . .

  My move to New York was part pull and part push. The pull was easy to identify. The New School for Social Research was an unlikely place for Leon to go, given his new intellectual move from the field of social psychology to that of visual perception. He quickly formed a “front” group, fondly called the Inter-University Consortium on Perception, an administrative device to have his friends from Columbia, New York University, and the City College of New York meet to discuss issues in the area of visual perception, and of course to also meet and have drinks. NYU recruited me in the eventful spring of 1968. While in the office of a future colleague at NYU, I remember hearing on the radio that Martin Luther King had just been assassinated. Vietnam was a big issue, and New York was buzzing. Before I knew it, I was part of that buzz. I had moved my family to the Silver Towers at NYU. Out of our twenty-sixth-floor apartment we watched the World Trade Center being built.

  My resistance to life in New York was less tangible. For almost eight years, I had lived with an identity—that of being completely immersed in human split brain research. I had been heavily involved for the first five years in virtually all of the experiments: all day, every day. I had written up the work in review articles and was also putting the finishing touches on my first book, The Bisected Brain,2 which Arnold Towe, from the University of Washington, had invited me to write. Still, relinquishing what I knew to be a vibrant way to approach understanding the brain was tough. While the cues were loud and clear, the path forward was not. I mean really, New York City?

  Being raised in Glendale, California, a place Evelyn Waugh called “home of Forest Lawn, the Disneyland of Death,” followed by four years in the boonies of Hanover, New Hampshire, followed by five years in Pasadena and finally three years in Santa Barbara, did not necessarily prepare one for New York City. When we arrived from California, it was a boiling hot, 94-degree August day, complete with humidity, traffic jams, and the local tourist attraction: rudeness. I muttered to myself, “Welcome to New York, sucker. You really blew it.” And it only seemed to get worse.

  We found a small Catholic school, St. Joseph’s Academy, for my daughter Marin, in Washington Square. I can remember picking our way around street bums as we walked to school every morning. One goes from indifference to social surroundings to vigilance. The saving grace of it all was that my daughter didn’t seem the least bit concerned. Nor was her younger sister, Anne, back at the play yard at the Towers, where various reprobates regularly came to relieve themselves. The New York mothers simply moved their bassinets and looked the other way. So long as my daughters shared punching the elevator buttons at the end of the day, all seemed well. We grew to love the city, and I spent the next seventeen years living either in Manhattan or in the suburbs. Joan Didion once wrote, though, that no Californian ever unpacks their bags when moving to New York, even though many wind up staying there for decades.3 It certainly played out that way for me.

  THE NEW YORK LUNCH

  Any kind of sequence in life appears less like a linear narrative and more like what happens when you beat up batter for Yorkshire pudding. In the pudding there are lots of little bubbles that combine to make bigger bubbles in the sticky goo and grow until the bubble pops, when, of course, it starts all over again. One might work away at something, and then something unrelated might interrupt that work. Or someone enters your life with a whole new set of ideas that set you on a different course. Our brains yearn for interruptions, even though we are annoyed when someone interrupts us.

  As we all surely know, life is not a sustained upward climb, where everything and everybody only gets better. After hearing multiple older professors say they were now doing their best work ever, a statistician friend asked me, “How could that be?” He found it funny that people actually think that way. 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.

  Still, we develop an overarching narrative about ourselves and about the issues we study. The narrative keeps us bounded. It allows us to avoid becoming dilettantes. We learn to know and loathe bullshit when we hear it. Being part of the “one brain, two minds” story has been life defining for me. But in 1969, and for the prior three years at UCSB, I had been listening to talk about motivation and reinforcement and dozens of other psychological concepts that had not been discussed much at Caltech. Apparently they had seeped in, and as I hit the deck at NYU, I began research on brain mechanisms underlying reinforcement on rats as well as on split-brain monkeys. No one paid much attention to the work, but I thought it was pretty cool. I was broadening my intellectual interests and no longer singing only one note about split-brain research. Starting new work on neurological patients would have to wait.

  So, while I was launching the new scientific work at NYU, the real continuity in my life was provided by Leon and our weekly lunch, which became a twenty-year tradition (Figure 15). We usually ate at a small Italian restaurant on Twelfth Street and University Place, Il Bambino. You could get a couple of martinis and shrimp scampi for about ten bucks. Or we ate at Dardanelles, the landmark Armenian restaurant just down University Place before Eleventh Street. The drill was always the same—a couple of drinks, a great meal, and always, always, lively conversation with one of the smartest men in the world. While noonday martinis are out of favor, once a year my wife, Charlotte (whom I married after Linda and I parted a few years after moving east), and I go out and give it a whirl for old times’ sake. Needless to say, we are out of practice and nap immediately afterward. Unbeknownst to me at the time, Leon used to go back and also take a nap, while I went back to work chewing mints. Leon taught me what friendship means. I have written elsewhere about what it was like to know him and will only reiterate here a small part of it.4

  FIGURE 15. Leon Festinger and our haunt on Twelfth Street in New York City. The restaurant shown here replaced Il Bambino, our favorite place. Our mutual friend Stanley Schachter, who frequently joined us, and I put together a book of Festinger’s work after his death.

  (Courtesy of the author)

  Once consumed with the desire to understand an issue, Leon couldn’t divert his attent
ion from it, and somehow nothing else seemed important in comparison. It wasn’t that he wasn’t aware of his surroundings—after all, New York was his Paris—but none of that mattered when he pursued an idea. I know this because early in his career he had left New York for Iowa City, Iowa, to study with Kurt Lewin, and New Yorkers don’t move to Iowa lightly.

  Lewin was a commanding figure in psychology, and to hear Leon tell it, was adept at generating new frameworks for studying psychological mechanisms. Leon had read Lewin as an undergraduate and was drawn to his ideas. The great philosopher R. G. Collingwood noted in his autobiography that as a very young man, he had stumbled upon the work of Kant. Though he couldn’t quite say why, Collingwood sensed that the work was important.5 For the undergraduate Leon, it was Lewin’s work that was so intriguing. He was fascinated by the idea that events could be better remembered if interrupted in their execution. Lewin’s research, prior to Leon’s arrival in Iowa, had laid the groundwork for the ultimate rejection of the classic laws of associationism, the belief that mental life resulted from the simple associations of events and experiences—an idea with tremendous surface validity.6

  By the time Leon moved to Iowa, Lewin’s interests had begun to shift toward social psychology. So did Leon’s during their years of collaboration, even though neither of them had ever received formal training in that area. You want to learn something? Go learn it. The bright, creative mind doesn’t need a training program. Announcing that he was now a social psychologist, Lewin took a position at MIT and started the Center for Group Dynamics, which Leon joined. He became interested in the behavior of small groups. Most important, his new group at MIT had developed ways to study complex human decision making in the laboratory. Lewin, Festinger, and many others migrated out of the dust bowl of empiricism to the east to test their hypothesis that private mental states were influenced by group dynamics—the special behaviors that arise both within groups and between groups.