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

by Gazzaniga, Michael S.

  In retrospect, none of this is surprising as the human comedy goes, even with scientists. Nonetheless, the Dartmouth project continued onward for several years, thanks to the diligent work of Van Horn and many others. Koslow, who was at the NIMH, somehow had arranged for the initial funding of the project through the National Science Foundation. He approved of its progress and renewed the funding for the project for five years in 2004. Unfortunately, he left the NIMH, and the new project leader cut the funding to two years, and that was that. It was too bad, since thousands of people used the database, both for research and as a teaching tool throughout the world. Today, multiple neuroimaging databases are emerging. The most noteworthy among them is the Human Connectome Project, an NIH-sponsored international study to map the functional and anatomical organization of the human brain. They are building upon the pioneering work accomplished at Dartmouth. All of this project was possible because a mathematician said to a neuroscientist in front of the Dirt Cowboy, “Oh we can do that.”

  GIVING YOUNG SCIENTISTS FREE REIN

  Ironically, the college that gave rise to Animal House and to other male excesses has also been a place that has nurtured and developed young women. It all started to change for the better in 1974 when the college went co-ed, against the protestations of many. John Kemeny oversaw the transition. As with many such revolutions, Dartmouth alums now wonder why it took so long. There is something very cool about the women of Dartmouth. They get it, and “it” is the zany nature of Dartmouth life.

  Conan O’Brien gave the commencement address in 2011. He is very much a Harvard man and is famously spunky, seemingly irreverent, and always funny. After poking some fun at the graduating class and standing at its tree-stump podium, he said:

  Your insecurity is so great, Dartmouth, that you don’t even think you deserve a real podium. I’m sorry. What the hell is this thing? It looks like you stole it from the set of Survivor: Nova Scotia. Seriously, it looks like something a bear would use at an AA meeting.

  No, Dartmouth, you must stand tall. Raise your heads high and feel proud.

  Because if Harvard, Yale, and Princeton are your self-involved, vain, name-dropping older brothers, you are the cool, sexually confident, lacrosse-playing younger sibling who knows how to throw a party and looks good in a down vest. Brown, of course, is your lesbian sister who never leaves her room. And Penn, Columbia, and Cornell—well, frankly, who gives a shit.8

  The men and women of Dartmouth roared their approval, as did the forty-first president of the United States, who was there to receive an honorary degree. Dartmouth women are cool in their vests. One of my seminar students back in 1998 was Sarah Tueting, a goalie for the championship Dartmouth women’s hockey team. She went on to win two gold medals at the Olympics. Off the rink she was intensely interested in neuroscience but also calmly nonchalant. My class butted up against her practice time, so she was obliged to bring her hockey stick to class in order to quickly exit for the rink. She would slip into the seminar room, slide the stick on the table with her books, and then ask a penetrating question about the nature of consciousness. As Conan says, very cool.

  Of course, the college is co-ed now at every level of education, including graduate students and postdoctoral trainees. My own laboratory was managed by a new Ph.D. from Dartmouth, Margaret Funnell, who had been the student of the distinguished memory psychologist Janet Metcalfe. As I was returning to Dartmouth from Davis, Margaret had written to ask if she could test J.W. on a memory test. I had known Margaret from my earlier time at the medical school, when she was interested in speech pathology. I immediately wrote her back and offered her a job. It was one of my better decisions. Before I could blink, she took over my program and ran it effortlessly and to everyone’s delight. Margaret’s husband, Jamie Funnell, was soon to become the headmaster at Cardigan Mountain School, a residential school for young boys. Indeed, they dined with the students every day and, as a consequence, there was nothing they didn’t know about male behavior. For Margaret, the lab was a source of amusement and, with her razor-sharp mind, a place to be creative with her own research and insights.

  It was Margaret who noticed something odd about the response of J.W.’s left hemisphere to a simple perceptual test. She had projected two objects, one above the other. The only difference between the two was their orientation. All each half brain had to do was judge if they were oriented similarly or not. Unbelievably, J.W.’s left half brain, the language-dominant half brain, could not do the task, while the silent right half brain performed perfectly.9 This simple result launched a vigorous research program that, in the end, yielded an important new insight developed by Margaret and her close colleague Paul Corballis. As I hinted earlier, along with the left hemisphere’s interpreter, they were discovering a right hemisphere interpreter for visual information. Think about that—there is a special, lateralized process in the right half brain that gives us the capacity to judge whether two visual objects are oriented in the same direction or not. The left speaking and analytical hemisphere, if disconnected from the right, cannot do that simple task. On a larger canvas, it points to the fact that just because a half brain can see, can categorize, can spell, can name, and can associate, it doesn’t mean it can judge orientation. Orientation uses a different module, and in humans, it has taken up residence in the right half brain. To use the current vernacular: It is amaaazing.

  Next, Abigail Baird roared, and I do mean roared, into our Dartmouth lives. A freshly minted Ph.D. from Harvard and a Vassar graduate before that, Abigail was like nothing I’d ever seen before. It becomes boring to say things like she was bright, energetic, and all the other descriptors that apply to everyone mentioned in this book. Abby was formidable and very funny. In untypical fashion for an aspiring academic scientist, she bought an old house about twenty miles outside of town and single-handedly remodeled it from top to bottom. She frequently came to the lab in her work clothes, splattered with paint and plaster but always ready to jump in and do the science. She launched a very clever research program using fMRI on something we adults see as very curious: the teenage brain.10 She was one of the first people to argue that teenagers’ brains were not fully wired up. Before I knew it, she was being recruited away from my program to be a member of the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences as a social psychologist in a regular tenure-line position. A powerful personality, Abby began to long for Vassar and returned to her alma mater after a few years.

  During this period, a new graduate student joined the lab from Wellesley, Molly Colvin. She had her pick of graduate schools and chose the woods of New Hampshire, in part because of the vibrancy of our brain imaging facilities and faculty. There were still no other psychology programs that had their own scanner, and none of them had Scott Grafton. She too was a pistol. So now I had Margaret, Abby, and Molly, not to mention several of the undergraduates all making our science better, and the social scene more organic and sophisticated. One undergraduate working in our lab at the time, Megan Steven, a boxer, became a Rhodes Scholar and went off to Oxford to work with the famous neuroscientist Colin Blakemore. She wound up studying synesthesia,* becoming one of the first to discover how the brains of people with this condition differ from the brains of ordinary folks.

  Advances in neuroimaging were occurring fast at the turn of the twenty-first century. Not only was fMRI able to detect where various cognitive processes were occurring in the brain, but new measuring techniques were adding the neural tract information, or put more simply, how information gets from one active place in the brain to another. Putting the “place” and “connection” techniques together was one of imaging’s recent accomplishments. This got us wondering: If we asked subjects to do a simple perceptual task that required processes known to be lateralized to one half brain or the other, then could we see the two different sites of activation and the activity of the neurons that must somehow coordinate the two sites? If so, maybe we could also capture the neural processes underlying the individual v
ariation that is commonly seen in any sort of simple behavioral task. In other words, some people do simple tasks quickly, and some take more time to do the same thing. Were different pathways active for the fast versus the slow responders? Abby, later joined by Molly and Megan, studied several dimensions of this research question and found that this latter is the case.11/12 The idea is that the individual variation in response times seen in any group of people is correlated with discrete and different neural pathways. The fast responders take the first cutoff—via the neural fibers closest to the sensory areas of the brain—to the other hemisphere while the slow ones take a later path.

  When there is a good buzz in a lab, everybody gets in on it. Soon enough, Matt Roser, a student of Michael Corballis’s,* Paul’s famous father, came to us from New Zealand. David Turk, a student of the equally famous Alan Baddeley,† joined the lab from University of Bristol, and Todd Handy came back to us with his freshly minted Ph.D. from Davis. One of the side benefits of hiring such incredible talent is that their mentors come and visit and also join in the fun. Life was very good indeed.

  IMPORTANT INTERLUDES: SERVING ON THE PRESIDENT’S COUNCIL OF BIOETHICS

  Like most Americans, I went to work on September 11, 2001, with no special issues to think about. I was actually leaving that night for a trip to Germany when word came in about the World Trade Center attack. The first version was that a small plane must have hit it, and the plane was demolished. Curious, I thought, but not earthshaking. My wife and I had spent many wonderful evenings in the restaurant, Windows on the World, including our wedding lunch. Indeed, in the spring of 2001 our beloved Cognitive Neuroscience Society meeting was held at the adjoining hotel, and we had a reception at Windows as well.

  It took only a few minutes to get the news straight. Before I knew it, the grad students had figured out how to hook the sophisticated video teaching room up to CNN. Soon a couple of dozen of us were staring at the scene aghast, many weeping, many simply stunned, as the realization hit, that the building was the least important issue. Then the second plane hit, and soon after, the first tower collapsed. Now there was chaos. I grabbed Scott Grafton, and we went to my house and sat frozen on the sofa watching TV as that horrible day unfolded. As much as we tried to abstract the situation, it couldn’t be done. Like most Americans, we were deeply affected.

  It is hard to capture the strong feelings of patriotism that ignited Americans after the September attack. In the following days, everybody I knew, independent of their personal politics, wanted to do something. Americans—and most of the free world—were pissed off. So, when about a month later I got a call from Leon Kass,* I was open to possibilities. He introduced himself on the phone and explained that he had been appointed by President George W. Bush to head up a bioethics council to deal with upcoming biomedical technological advancements. Would I be interested in joining the council? I didn’t know what to say other than an immediate “Yes.” At the same time, I didn’t know much about bioethics, and I wasn’t sure they had the right man. Kass assured me the council was about bioethics, but not composed entirely of bioethicists. At the time, there was no discussion about who the other members might be, how he got my name, my political affiliation or beliefs, and the extent of my knowledge about immediate issues such as stem cell research. Bush had made a speech about stem cells that August; while I had heard it, I didn’t think much about it other than it seemed balanced to me at the time. Quite frankly, like most busy people, unless the topic was right up my alley I simply nodded at it.

  An incredible process unfolded after that call and before the actual meeting in Washington. The White House Personnel Office starts to vet, as does the FBI. There are endless forms to fill out, including assurances that there are no conflicts of interest with investments and other outside commitments. Friends and neighbors are called about your character; guarantees are given that you have no undocumented workers or others on a personal payroll for whom you are not paying Social Security taxes. It really is quite unbelievable.

  Knowing that the first meeting was coming in January 2002, I began to bone up on stem cells. What was so interesting to me was that while everyone seemed to have an opinion about them, very few people knew the first thing about their underlying biology, even colleagues in biology. We all had a sort of introductory biological knowledge, usually vaguely stated. What was the big deal anyway with this new technology? Then the penny dropped. It’s all about the embryo question, the question of when human life begins. Or really, the question is: Is there a difference between when life begins and when life as a human begins? When does one confer all the rights of a born human on a multiplying group of cells? Boom, it was the scientific/political question of the century. The meeting was going to be the place to discuss this grand issue, and I had no idea it was going to draw me into an eight-year investment of time.

  When the first meeting finally occurred in Washington, I met the other seventeen members of the council who took part in the stem cell vote. I knew many of them by reputation, but only one of them personally. Paul McHugh had been the chair of psychiatry at Johns Hopkins for years and is credited with introducing biological psychiatry to American clinical medicine. Though psychoanalysis was still prevalent, he thought that by better understanding the brain, most of mental disease would be better understood. He is a remarkable human being in every way, and I adore him. He is a Democrat, a Catholic, and unpredictable in so many delightful ways. With his Boston brogue and sparkling glint, he could slay a tiger or gently turn aside an aggressive remark. After all, he was an experienced psychiatrist and had seen everything.

  The first day of the council meeting in January 2002, we all had our moment in the sun and gathered together in the Roosevelt Room at the White House. We were to get our marching orders from President Bush, and all of us were eager and attentive. The president came into what is a tiny room, took charge of the meeting, and encouraged us to leave no stone unturned in our discussions. He then mused, “I like debate, and let me tell you, you haven’t seen debate until you have heard Rumsfeld and Powell go at it.”

  The president then asked each of us to say a couple of words about who we were and what we did. It started out very formally with a string of statements in the form of “I am Professor X from Harvard and I do Y.” It finally came time for Paul to speak and I will never forget it. Paul said, “Mr. President, I am Paul McHugh, and before anything else, let me ask you how are you doing?” A few days before, it had been widely reported the president had been watching a Sunday football game and had slipped off the couch and banged his head, causing a gash above his eyebrow. Bush broke into a big grin and said, “Well, other than feeling pretty silly about falling off a couch and finding myself looking up at my dog, I feel good. I have never fallen off anything before—without drink.” In one quick move, McHugh had broken the ice for all of us, and the president, after poking fun at himself, had set a firm but warm agenda.

  In fact, the council was packed with talented people. It reflected a true cross section of the intellectual and political culture, and because of that underlying fact, it became a hot potato. Usually Washington councils dealing with issues such as bioethics or biomedical issues are one-sided, and all reflect the secular views of most modern academics. Utility and mechanism are discussed, not Aristotelian categories, concepts of justice, means/end, is/ought, and a host of other philosophical and now-political issues involved with human decision making. There were battles royal going on all the time, and yet Leon Kass kept it mainly civil.

  ETHICS, EMBRYOS, AND POLITICS

  As I look back at those eight years, it was all about the stem cells. It started to become clear to me after the January meeting where my thinking would lead me. The gravity of the topic found me talking about the issues involved—the beginning of life, the idea of abortion—the issue of, as the Yale surgeon Richard Seltzer put it, “life avulsed.”13 At work, at professional meetings, and at the dinner table, the embryo question always generates react
ions. One evening I brought the topic up with Francesca and Zachary. At the time, Francesca was a high school biology student and already had her views, driven by her understanding of cell processes. She wanted to start a national science-club movement called the “totipotes.” When my son was asked, “When do you think life begins?” he matter-of-factly rejoined, not looking up from his enormous plate of food, “Not until your first open-field tackle.”

  Beyond a surface familiarity with the idea of stem cells, I really didn’t see all the important distinctions. I was at the same level as most people who thought about it (that is, when they thought about the issue at all): Stem cells can help cure disease, but when they come from embryos that will then be destroyed, it pisses people off. While I didn’t know much, I did know whom to call, my buddy Ira Black. Ira was a molecular neurobiologist and practicing neurologist who would soon be running the New Jersey Stem Cell Institute. We had been colleagues at Cornell, and he was a co-conspirator on dozens of projects. He was truly engaging, worked around the clock, and was always full of good cheer.

  One snowy winter evening in Sharon, my wife and I called Ira, who was still at work, while we sat cozy in our den with a roaring fire. Ira was deep into his work on adult stem cells, which are different from embryonic stem cells and hold out a different promise for biomedical use. During that phone call, Ira laid out the story. Throughout that year, he became my constant consultant on what was going on with stem cell research.