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

by Gazzaniga, Michael S.

  One day in the early 1980s, I took him on my rounds and showed him a variety of phenomena, ranging from perceptual disorders to language disorders. He had never seen anything like it and commented afterward that the neurologic patient was really what many psychologists were looking for. After all, he observed, psychologists try to test the brain’s limits by making college sophomores work fast or by rapidly presenting them with stimuli to provoke errors. In the clinic, the errors pour out of damaged brain systems with little or no effort.

  One patient we saw was a distinguished New York executive who had fallen down a staircase. He was reported to be globally aphasic, which means that he would not understand much, if anything, that was spoken to him and would speak only a little. As we arrived in his room, the computer tomography technicians were fetching him for a scan, so George and I tagged along. The technician asked Mr. C. to slide over to the gurney, to which he replied, “Yes, sir.” Once positioned and rolling down the hallway to the scanner, he was asked about his comfort. “Are you feeling okay?” “Yes, sir,” said Mr. C. After arriving at the scanner, the technician slid the patient off the gurney onto the table and again asked if he felt all right. “Yes, sir,” said Mr. C. The scan was performed and Mr. C. was returned to his room. The technician, who was familiar with my studies, turned to me and asked why we were interested in this patient, as he felt there was nothing wrong with him. I turned to the patient and said, “Mr. C., are you the king of Siam?” “Yes, sir,” he replied with great assuredness. George grinned and observed that success is always grounded in simply asking the right question.

  It wasn’t always fun, however. Once we started our formal program, a series of famous neuroscientists and cognitive scientists came for a week at a time to observe and share ideas. Accompanying this event was the obligatory social dinner, which included other scientists and neurologists. The intent at these dinners was to continue discussing the theme topics of the week, in a slightly less formal manner. Usually they were pleasant, even inspiring, but one dinner was an exception. There were about eight guests in a private room at the New York University Club. After a drink or two, we all sat down for dinner, and the soup had no sooner been served when one of the neurologists cleared his throat and said, “The history of the study of the human mind has been rich in neurology, but can you tell me one thing psychologists have discovered in the last hundred years?” I could not believe my ears. George solved the problem by thrusting his chair back and walking out of the room. What ensued was the longest and most awkward dinner of the decade. George and I never spoke of it, ever, but it served as an emblem of how difficult it would be to structure a new field.

  As we continued to consider how best to launch our new field during our evening rendezvous at the Rockefeller bar, we talked about everything from neglect to neologisms. It was on one of those evenings, in a taxi leaving the bar, that we coined the term cognitive neuroscience. What we meant by cognitive neuroscience would emerge, slowly. We already knew that neuropsychology was not what we had in mind; tying specific cognitive capacities to brain lesions would not be our enterprise. The intellectual limitations of that idea seemed self-evident, especially with the advent of new brain imaging techniques. These techniques were revealing that lesions previously considered limited to only the primary tissue they damaged instead had more extensive damage to the surrounding area. This meant that it was less clear what areas of the brain were performing what functions.

  One evening I asked George, “Just what is it cognitive science wants to know?” He looked at me, alerted for action, and then said, “Let me think about that.” The following week, the guiding ideas behind cognitive neuroscience took form in a long memo from him, which I present in edited form in Appendix I.

  Somehow our ideas came together and we cooked up a plan. George had been advising the Sloan Foundation on the general topic of cognitive science. The foundation had always strongly supported MIT. Accordingly, it was considering funding MIT, where cognitive science was taking shape as a focus on linguistics, almost exclusively. Presenting the diagram shown in Figure 28, George convinced the foundation that the narrow linguistic view was shortsighted. He argued that the cognitive science(s) should be inclusive of related fields, one of which would become mine, “cognitive neuroscience.” As he put it in a 2003 journal article:

  The report was submitted, reviewed by another committee of experts, and accepted by the Sloan Foundation. The program that was initiated provided grants to several universities with the condition that the funds be used to promote communication between disciplines. One of the smaller grants went to Michael Gazzaniga, then at the Cornell Medical School, and enabled him to initiate what has since become cognitive neuroscience. As a consequence of the Sloan program, many scholars became familiar with and tolerant of work in other disciplines. For several years, interdisciplinary seminars, colloquia and symposia flourished.9

  They sure did. Jeff’s wife, Ann, helped me set up a nonprofit 501(c)(3) called the “Cognitive Neuroscience Institute” and we convinced several New York universities to take part; a couple of years later, we benefited from an application to the Sloan Foundation for funds. Our goal was to facilitate cognitive neuroscience any way we could think of. We did it in several ways. We still do it.

  FIGURE 28. George Miller’s long report on the state of cognitive science for the Sloan Foundation was summed up with this diagram. This simple summary of his hard work encouraged scientists to consider neuroscience as part of cognitive science.

  (Courtesy of the author)

  SPECIAL MEETINGS, SPECIAL PLACES

  One of my many personal paradoxes is that although I am about as routinized as one can be, I hate the status quo, especially the intellectual status quo. Helping to develop a new synthesis between fields especially appealed to me. In order to foster interdisciplinary interactions, once cognitive neuroscience studies were up and running I would hold an annual, weeklong, ten-person conference. Since I was a one-man show, my strategy was to pick a topic of great interest, pick a venue people loved to visit, and let each of them have a full half day to talk about their research. It worked. The venues included Barcelona, Kusadasi (in Turkey), Moorea, (one of the Tahitian islands), Venice, Paris, and Napa.

  Of course, most of what happens at a meeting takes place in between the formal sessions. Each person is sizing up the field and asking questions that never get asked in the routine setting for professional gatherings. They are also, each in their own way, determining what is credible and what is not. It all comes pouring out during spontaneous lunches and dinners, walks through foreign villages, drinks at the local bars, tours of the local sites, and yes, occasionally, as a result of a question at the meeting itself.

  One day, Festinger and his lifelong friend Stan Schachter, the social psychologist from Columbia; Gary Lynch, the enigmatic and driven molecular neurobiologist from the University of California, Irvine; and I were strolling through Kusadasi, a town on the Turkish Riviera noted for its colorful bazaars. We happened into a leather store that sold carry-on-size duffle bags. The bag had about twenty zippers on it. One could take a normal-size bag and reduce it to a handbag by continuing to zip it down in size, zipper by zipper. Stanley thought that was about the coolest thing he had ever seen and decided to buy one. Leon seemed impressed as well and was thinking about getting one, too. He was in the throes of a final decision when he suddenly said, “Wait, why and when would you use it?” Lynch fired back, “Oh, that’s easy. Let’s say you start out on a long trip and the bag is full of clothes. As you go along, you start to throw out your dirty clothes, and take the bag down a notch. By the end of the trip, it is only pocket size so you bring it home.” It was one of those bonding moments (Figure 29) that are hard to get at the American Psychological Association meeting in Washington, D.C., with its more than eleven thousand attendees.

  FIGURE 29. Time for a coffee break in Kusadasi, Turkey. Seated at the bar, from left to right, are Leon Festinger, Stan Schachter,
Gary Lynch, Michael Posner, Steve Hillyard, and Ted Bullock.

  (Courtesy of the author)

  Lynch was a marvelous combination of raw intellect, endless curiosity, and just plain fun. He was a regular at our first meetings, as he had the essential ingredient: He could cut across local jargon and get to the ideas at hand. And he was witty. On the way to Kusadasi, I was changing planes at London’s Heathrow airport and getting on a Turkish Airline plane to Izmir. There was Gary at the same gate, having just arrived from Los Angeles. As we settled into our seats in a row overlooking the wing, Gary turned to me and said, “You know that part of the wing that says ‘no step’? All I see are footprints around it.” We were truly off on a new adventure.

  We sponsored a series of unforgettable meetings, each organized around a forward-looking scientific topic, such as the neurobiology of memory. The meeting on that topic particularly stood out. We held it in Moorea, as I’d spotted a fantastic travel deal: round-trip from Los Angeles to Moorea, with hotel, $770. It was in Tahiti, and the hotel was exquisite, nestled by the sea with sumptuous-looking food. So I cooked up another dream list of participants and got on the phone. “Hi, this is Mike Gazzaniga. We are holding a week long meeting in Moorea. We can contribute a thousand dollars to the costs. Would you like to come?” Ten invitations, ten immediate “yes” responses, all in about ten minutes. A few months later, Francis Crick; Geoffrey Hinton, known as the “godfather of neural networks”; Corey Goodman, molecular neurogeneticist; Gary Lynch; David Olton, an expert on memory; R. Duncan Luce, the mathematical psychologist; Herb Killackey, an expert on neurodevelopment; Ira Black, a neurologist and basic scientist; Gordon Shepherd, an expert on neural circuitry; and of course my sidekick Leon were hot at it under the swaying coconut palms (Figure 30).

  FIGURE 30. Moorea, Tahiti, the site of one of my small meetings with big minds. Francis Crick and I worked here, along with (right to left) Leon Festinger, Herb Killackey, R. Duncan Luce, and Ira Black.

  (Courtesy of the author)

  When Francis Crick was present anywhere, the chances were that the mean IQ of the room jumped up. His sparkling blue eyes and his incessant interest in biological mechanisms kept everyone alert. He was new to the field of neuroscience, which only meant he questioned more intently. After every speaker spoke, Crick would return to what became his mantra for the meeting: “But what you are doing is solvable in principle. The question is, what does it mean?” Let me tell you, that is an annoying question. Everyone was mumbling about it back in their grass bedrooms. What do you mean “it’s solvable in principle”? Neuroscience was still trying to get the underlying data about basic brain functions. It was collecting the facts upon which a grand theory of what it all means would be built. Francis Crick and James Watson had already solved what a bunch of molecular facts meant for mechanisms of heredity.10 Neuroscience simply was not there yet. Today, some thirty years later, neuroscience still has not collected the key data because, to some extent, it is not known what that key data even is. By the end of the meeting, everyone present had a far deeper sense of the issues and appreciated the conflicting views.

  Years have intervened, but the idea that neuroscience needs cognitive science has prevailed. The molecular approach, in the absence of the cognitive context—which is to say, studying the brain without the mind—limits the industrious neuroscientist to pursuing answers to biological questions in a manner not unlike that of the kidney physiologist. Although such approaches represent an admirable enterprise, when put in that light they make it impossible for the neuroscientist to attack the central integrative questions of mind-brain research. Cognitive neuroscience has now become something of a household word, with its own journal, society, and conferences. Some of the most highly attended meetings at the huge Society for Neuroscience convention are on topics in cognitive neuroscience.

  THE TWO POSNERS, ONE OF A KIND

  I never met Michael and Jerry Posner’s parents, but they did something right. These two brothers, Mike being one of the world’s leading basic scientists of the brain, and Jerry, one of the world’s leading neurologists, are spectacular intellects and, even better, spectacular human beings. Mike’s home base is the University of Oregon in Eugene, a town he dearly loves. Yet he was eager to travel if the visit would help satisfy his unending desire to do research on how we humans work. A student of the great Paul Fitts at the University of Michigan, Mike was now his own man and had decided that maybe the new field of cognitive neuroscience might be of interest. George Miller and I had launched a very young program on the topic, and Mike came to New York to help. Having his brilliance around made a huge difference. It also didn’t hurt to have his famous brother across the street at Memorial Sloan Kettering keeping an eye on us.

  Mike’s passion was the phenomenon of attention. How did it work? Would it be disrupted in patients with various kinds of brain lesions? Indeed, what happened to cognitive processes following brain injury? In the early 1980s, brain imaging was not yet available for clinical use. Brain-lesioned patients were all we had. So, like George walking the wards, Mike thought that hearing a series of experts talk about all of this would be elevating. Of course, back then, sitting next to him in various seminars, grand rounds, and more was Jeff. The precise and well-formulated paradigms Mike had developed appealed to Jeff, so Jeff started to parrot me, asking Mike: “Why don’t we try your stuff on the splits?” This became the cry, not only for Mike’s work but for many other scientists who passed through our seminars in those early years.

  Posner had basically shown that processes of attention could be defined and quantified precisely. For example, a person could direct their attention to a spatial location and if they did, then a subsequent event at that location could be responded to more quickly. If the person had been tricked, and the experimenter had told them to attend to a particular place, but the subsequent event, known as a probe, came up at another place, the reaction time was much slower. Attention was indeed a process that manifested itself clearly in Posner’s elegant paradigm, and understanding how it worked would be cool. Jeff asked, “What if we cue the right hemisphere to attend to a spot that only the left hemisphere saw. Would the right hemisphere then also be better at responding to a probe?” In other words, could one half brain get the opposite half brain ready for an event, even though the other half brain didn’t know it was being set up? In short, is the attention system somehow still connected in a split-brain person?

  That is exactly what Jeff found.11 Somehow a disconnected half brain could alert the opposite half brain to get ready for something to happen. It could not tell it what to get ready for in a cognitive/perceptual way. It could only tell it to get ready. It was a solid finding, and one that Mike Posner found intriguing. Apparently studying complex mental skills, such as attention, could be illuminated by studying patients, in this case, split-brain patients. He returned to Oregon and soon established a pioneering relationship with Oscar Marín, an outstanding behavioral neurologist in Portland. For years Mike went to Portland weekly to study patients. He was indeed hooked. A few years later, he went to Washington University to help launch some of the first studies on cognitive processes that used the new brain imaging techniques being developed by Marcus Raichle and many others.12 It was becoming hard to keep up in our expanding field.

  As other luminaries passed through New York, it fell to me to entertain them for dinner after their day’s work. The usual drill was that George, Charlotte and I, the guest, and two or three residents or postdoctoral fellows would go to dinner at a First Avenue restaurant, such as Piccolo Mondo or Maxwell’s Plum, or the Manhattan Club, or even on occasion, Mortimer’s. Now, a dinner in New York, even in those days, could not be had for the twenty-five dollars a head we were allotted. We were always cognizant of costs, but we represented a major institution and foundation, and we were dead set on hosting in the proper fashion. The reality was that the dinner bill ran around sixty dollars per person, which we submitted for reimbursement. This went
on for a year or so.

  One day, I got a call from Plum’s assistant, Gertrude. She informed me that Dr. Plum had decided that there would be a twenty-five-dollar limit per person for dinners involving the neurology department and that was that. I complained to Jeff about the new unrealistic rule, to which Jeff shot back, “Oh great. So when we go out to dinner, we say, ‘Excuse me, Dr. Kandel, would you please skip ordering an entrée?’” After puzzling the problem, I instructed my secretary to write a memo to the file stating that Dr. and Mrs. Konstant would always be joining us for our hosting dinners. Our ghostly guests would help cover some of the shortfall because the restaurants were not going to give us a break, needless to say.

  Years went by before I got another call from Gertrude. Our visitor’s program had long since ceased, and we were on to other adventures. Apparently, Dr. Plum himself had finally taken his own group out to dinner, received the New York–size bill, submitted it for reimbursement, and was rejected. He wanted to know, “How did Mike get reimbursed all those years?” I pointed out to Gertrude that Cornell did not have a limit for such things, that it was Dr. Plum’s own limit he asked accounting to impose on the neurology department. All he had to do as chair was to call up and lift the restriction. “Or,” I said, “put down that Dr. and Mrs. Konstant were there as well.”

  BRAIN IMAGING CONFIRMS SPLIT-BRAIN SURGERY

  A major question persisted in our now twenty-year-old work on split-brain patients. Were they actually completely split? Did the surgeons cut everything they said they cut? Was the entire callosum sectioned or had there been some inadvertent sparing of connecting fibers? A surgeon’s notes of an operation and the actual reality of what was done inside the head can vary and frequently do. Thanks to computer-driven microscopes and more, this problem has been effectively addressed over the years and is a story in itself. Still, for us the question was simple enough. Are the patients completely split?