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

by Gazzaniga, Michael S.

  My wife was telling Stan how she had carefully explored Davis. She had gone into the parks and talked to the mothers strolling with their kids. She had talked about the schools, about the weather, about everything mothers want to know about a place. She reported all loved living in Davis. Stan looked at her and said, “Charlotte, you need to interview the people who left Davis.” It didn’t help matters that Stan never understood why anybody would live west of the Hudson River. After another drink or so, we reminded Stan what our mutual friend Leon use to say. “Well, you can’t control for everything.” Despite Stan’s skepticism, we decided to take the job.

  BUILDING FROM SCRATCH: JUST DO IT

  Having already established trust in those in charge at the university turned out to be a good thing. Upon hitting the deck at Davis, I discovered that no real permanent space would be available for ten years, at least. The animal researchers who were to be a big part of the new program would do their work at the distant Primate Center. Others would be scattered around campus in various office/labs. This was hardly ideal.

  I took to driving around Davis to learn the town, find a house, and look for space for the center. One day I spotted a building shell for sale in a research park (Figure 35). It was a handsome structure with a price tag of around $3 million. After peeking in all the windows, I found a phone and called Bob Grey. By this time he was provost. I said, “Bob, I found a building in Research Park for sale for three million. Can you buy it?” He put me on hold and then came back on the line, “Yes, we can; send the information to me.” And that was that. The center now had a home, but it would take time to design the inside space and have it built, lots of time, since the city inspectors and the UC inspectors were both involved. Where would we work while all of that was going on?

  FIGURE 35. The empty and unfinished building I spotted in a research park outside the University of California, Davis. I called the provost and after a minute or two, he said the university would buy it.

  (Courtesy of the author)

  I drove around some more and found another building, almost across the street from the new center. It could be rented and was ready to go with plenty of interim space. Another call to Grey and another yes. The new group would be placed in an empty building in Research Park only loosely associated with the university. Not a warm and fuzzy academic setting. It was a concrete tilt-up building with a surrounding parking lot. But we would be able to work closely together.

  There was also the private move. How would we be able to buy a new house, when our old house still had not sold? It was 1992, house prices were dropping, and when they drop, they drop everywhere. A good deal in Davis meant a bad deal in Vermont! Because our beautiful new house had not sold, we were left with no option but to rent it out. What a mess.

  I was sitting in some kind of meeting at the NIH, reading the New York Times at the back of the room. Years earlier, my friend Gary Lynch had started a company called Cortex. During one of our small meetings in Venice, we had been enjoying a late evening in the Piazza San Marco when Gary told me about his new company. Casually he said I should be on his board. In a gesture to humor him, I said sure and bought 25,000 shares for $25 total and promptly forgot all about it. As I was cruising through the business page of the Times that morning, I noticed Cortex had just received a large contract for $14 million. I looked up the stock and saw it was selling for about five bucks a share! I bolted out of my seat and went into the hallway and called the company. I asked their finance officer if my shares could be sold. I assumed there would be some kind of restriction on this, since I had been a board member. He told me that since I was no longer on the board and three years or so had passed, I could sell them. I hung up the phone, called my broker, and told him to sell them all. He did. A few days later a check for $100,000 arrived. We were now ready to buy a house in Davis. The joys of sheer luck are a big part of life, and to this day I buy Gary dinner whenever we manage to see each other.

  Davis is really sort of a tomato patch, a flat piece of farmland accompanied by a tomato sauce factory. It is extremely hot in the summer but wonderfully balmy at night as the cool air moves in up the Sacramento Delta. The town had its origins in agriculture, and UC Davis was the research engine of the vast California agriculture industry. Agriculture needs fertilizer, and fertilizer owners build wonderful homes. With Gary’s money, we bought a dazzling one designed in southwestern style with floor-to-ceiling windows looking out on a huge swimming pool, which in turn was lined with palm trees and pink oleander hedges. The front yard was a cactus garden. It looked positively Mediterranean. The whole house could not have been more different than what we’d had in Vermont, and it had one very powerful dimension: the pool. Almost instantly upon arriving, our kids, after a rather sentimental departure, seemed to forget about Vermont.

  Thirty-three million people can’t be wrong. California is spectacularly different at every turn. Forty minutes west of Davis are the vineyards and restaurants of Napa. Sixty minutes south is San Francisco and one hundred minutes northeast is Lake Tahoe. It wasn’t long before we were totally infected by Tahoe, which led us to buy a cabin. The skiing, of course, was fabulous, but the summers in Tahoe rang sublime. And Davis had something that the Texan in Charlotte missed: a big sky. All in all, Davis proved to be a magical place to live.

  The serious part of any project centers on the people who are hired. The University of California is perhaps the top-ranked research university in the world. It demands that all hires meet the highest standards of scholarship, and until recently it had been largely assumed that anyone who met those standards was naturally able to teach well. That myth had broken down, and now the hires had to truly be able to do both. Of course, leeway was granted on the teaching part, but hiring excellence in research never budges. My first administrative energies were directed toward that goal.

  Hiring at universities is a tediously complex process requiring input from the faculty, and I mean all of the faculty. They make the special interest groups in Washington, D.C., look like warm-and-fuzzy, bipartisan zealots. In the world of academics, everybody has a special interest. How was I going to consolidate all the special interests into a coherent program? In what area of neuroscience would we focus? And which new hires would be based in what academic unit? Suddenly, the view from the ground made it all look impossible.

  Leo knew all of this, of course, because he had been the center’s architect. As a veteran member of the campus, everybody knew him, and he knew everybody. Academics can be bland, passive, detached, aggressive, obstructionist, you name it. Not Leo. He is a vibrant personality who engages the mind. Sometimes the message wasn’t liked, but everybody liked him, and they trusted him. Leo was working the faculty, bringing them along all the time. He had placed his bet on me, and he was going to help make it work.

  A plan was struck that pleased everybody. They basically said to me, “Mike, start bringing in people, and we will offer jobs to the best. If you screw up, we will let you know.” Trust once again prevailed, even though we still hadn’t chosen an area of concentration. The idea was to get quality, and the rest would take care of itself. I took my hunting license and went to work.

  All of us kept talking about the pool of ten jobs we had, but we tended to forget that each of those jobs was pegged to a particular academic unit. At first I maintained that where people would be academically housed was a mere detail. I have discovered in life that I can be wrong, then dead wrong, and then so wrong it is hilarious. In this instance, a new candidate would come into town, be interviewed, and give a job talk. Then, with quick polling in the hallways, I’d get the consensus from my new colleagues as to whether the candidate was desirable from their point of view. Depending on that quick calculation, I would then do the soft sell up in my office. Not surprisingly, the candidate would ask, “What department would I be in?” I would say, “Well you have a choice. You can be either in the Medical School, the Biology Department, or the Psychology Department.” They would th
en ask, “What’s the difference?” I would say, “In the Medical School it is an eleven-month appointment, it is more money, and you basically don’t have to teach. Now, in the Biology Department it is a nine-month appointment and you have to teach one course. The Psychology Department is also a nine-month appointment and you have to teach three courses.” After the slightest of pauses, most candidates would then say, “Which Medical School department would be best for me?” I quickly learned to offer no choice and tell them up front which department they were being recruited for; that sped the hiring conversations along with few or no problems.

  While there was implicit pressure to do something big, to make a splash in the scientific community by hiring a well-established person, I ultimately pulled back from this approach. It turns out that 85 percent of what are called “senior hires” never work out. The process, in terms of the time invested and of the inordinate amount of wooing (from weeks to months to years), is expensive and usually ends up nowhere. A program can be held hostage to a big name, and in the end, nobody has been hired and the program trying to be built is injuriously delayed. This was all explained to me by those more knowledgeable, but my outrageous optimism found me trying anyway—but just once. I now believe those statistics! The big shots don’t usually have to leave where they are, and when push comes to shove, they suddenly adopt a wish list that would not be granted to the queen of England. If the wish list is granted, they take the job, and if not, they take the easy route by staying put, usually scoring a handsome retention package. The most painful part is listening to the post-decision rationalizations as to why they “feel” they couldn’t accept (the interpreter talking).

  My solution was simple enough. The senior stars of the field are stars because they train really talented people. If a particular lab has been putting out particularly interesting work, there is a good chance that the lead graduate student or seasoned postdoctoral fellow in that lab is the person you want. They are young, less expensive to establish, full of zip, and usually looking for a job. In addition, a job in the UC system was coveted. So, one contacts the successful scientists to see who is on deck for a job and makes sure they know about our openings. It worked like a charm. It wasn’t long before a stream of unbelievably talented and eager young scientists started to march though the center. It was easy to pick the best of the best. They pop out from the background in some hard-to-define way. The decisions on whom to hire were always unanimous (Figure 36).

  FIGURE 36. The fabulous eight young professors first hired at the Center for Neuroscience, UC Davis: Barbara Chapman, Charles Gray, Ken Britton, Leah Krubitzer, Bruno Olshausen, Greg Recanzone, Ron Mangun, and Mitch Sutter.

  (Courtesy of the author)

  THE PATIENT’S TURN TO TRAVEL

  It wasn’t long before I knew we would continue to study split-brain patients. J.W. and his wife seemed open to the idea of moving to Davis, too, even though California was a long way from their tiny hometown in New Hampshire. J.W. knew California as a result of his trips to La Jolla, and he had always liked it. With the number of fellows and graduate students now working for me at UC Davis, we could keep J.W. busy every day. Through the administrative genius of my project director, we were able to compensate J.W. and his wife enough to live in a very nice house in South Davis (Figure 37). It worked for a year and a half, until they became homesick. As it turned out, he was a little over two years ahead of my own yearning for New England.

  FIGURE 37. J.W. at home in Davis with his wife. J.W. loved to assemble model cars, and he has sustained this hobby all his life. We picked them up in New Hampshire, moved them to California, and moved them back again.

  (Courtesy of the author)

  Being able to test J.W. almost daily led to dozens upon dozens of experiments. One of the first young scientists hired was Ron Mangun, who had been my postdoctoral fellow at Dartmouth. As the new director, I was given one appointment out of the ten as a courtesy, but also because those administrators knew I would be busy dealing with stuff that I hadn’t fully anticipated. I immediately asked Ron, large in body, mind, and heart, if he wanted to come back to California and start a new life. He jumped at it. I had my first hint that everybody wants to move to California, especially if they are young and ambitious (Figure 38). Soon enough, Ron would be hired away from our UC center by Duke University to run their new center. Later, however, he returned to Davis to run its new Mind/Brain Center, the sequel to the Center for Neuroscience. Now he is dean of social sciences at Davis.

  FIGURE 38. Life for young academics is uncertain, as talent and mentorship are hard to find. Here neophyte Todd Handy, who originally wandered into our labs in Hanover, works in the basement of Dartmouth’s Pike House. Soon he developed a passion for research and followed Mangun to UC Davis for his graduate work. When I left Davis for Dartmouth, I convinced Handy to join the new, swanky labs Dartmouth had built for us. He is now a professor at the University of British Columbia.

  (Courtesy of the author)

  As an expert in the field of electrical recordings of the brain, Ron began to study whether the flow of neural activity could be tracked by measuring when certain parts of the brain reacted to a light presented to only one visual field—a simple experiment. We knew that in the normal brain, information had to be communicated from one side of the brain to the other. We also had the continuing debate about possible subcortical communication between the hemispheres. Maybe recording actual neurophysiological signals could illuminate the question. It was already known that certain brain waves accompanied the processing of visual information, something called the P1/N1 complex.1 These waves were easily detectable and amazingly symmetrical over both visual hemispheres, even when a stimulus was presented to only one visual field. How and through what nerve circuits was that all getting done?

  Remember, if a word is flashed to the left visual field, the information travels directly to the right hemisphere. If you’ve named it out loud, that information has already flowed from your right visual cortex over to the left brain speech hemisphere. Could that flow of electrical activity actually be detected? Simply doing the scalp recordings was the easy part. Anybody who has had an EEG knows the drill. A little squirt of conducting jelly is placed on the skull, and a sensitive electrode is mushed into it. It is connected to a preamplifier/amplifier and ultimately to a computer for analysis. That is the easy part.

  As expected, Ron showed that the signs of the signal first appeared in the right hemisphere. Then, a few milliseconds later, it appeared in the opposite hemisphere as well. It was clear as a bell. He then found a patient who was going to have full callosal surgery, but in stages starting with the anterior areas first. When he did the experiment, the P1/N1 complex continued to flow from the right hemisphere to the left hemisphere after the first surgery. In that patient, it took three surgeries to get the entire callosum sectioned. After the second surgery, which moved the disconnection ever farther back toward the posterior regions, there was no effect on the brain wave. Because some fibers had been inadvertently spared, there was a third surgery, which completed the sectioning of the callosum, and the brain wave no longer appeared in the left hemisphere, only in the right hemisphere, which first received the stimulus. That cinched it. Now there was no question: The synchrony of brain waves in our cortex was due not only to an identifiable brain structure—the callosum—but to a specific region of that brain structure. It was also clear from his data that one could track the timing of the exchange of the information.2 All of this work was confirming something else in our minds: With enough cleverness, both the place and the timing of the underlying neural processes guiding a psychological phenomenon, such as visual attention, were at hand.

  While J.W. participated in Ron’s experiment, he was also involved in several others. The sheer convenience of having him, with his incredibly cooperative nature, live around the corner made him the dream patient to study. He was smart, humorous, and respected by all the researchers. He could dazzle at one moment wi
th an easily visible skill that seemed only a split-brain patient could do, while at the next moment be part of a study that required hundreds of trials to extract some kind of significant response difference in reaction times. Those kinds of studies revealed many interesting phenomena, but they were only evident in the data analysis, not as some kind of obvious and unique behavioral skill.

  One such obvious skill was the ability to do two things at once. Jim Eliassen, a graduate student who had come with us from Dartmouth, was captivated with the idea that J.W. might be able to guide each hand to do conflicting tasks. Eliassen, a clever and canny Stanford graduate, was unfailingly a gentleman. He always brought a level of good cheer, mixed with a sharp and unwavering eye for experimental detail. While he meticulously quantified everything, the phenomenon Jim studied was so behaviorally evident that it made it all the way to a PBS special, hosted by Alan Alda. They set up the study by showing Alda trying to do Jim’s task.