One of the world's leading neuroscientists explores how best to understand the human condition by examining the biological, psychological, and highly social nature of our species within the social context of our lives.
What happened along the evolutionary trail that made humans so unique? In his widely accessible style, Michael Gazzaniga looks to a broad range of studies to pinpoint the change that made us thinking, sentient humans, different from our predecessors.
Neuroscience has been fixated on the life of the psychological self for the past fifty years, focusing on the brain systems underlying language, memory, emotion, and perception. What it has not done is consider the stark reality that most of the time we humans are thinking about social processes, comparing ourselves to and estimating the intentions of others. In Human, Gazzaniga explores a number of related issues, including what makes human brains unique, the importance of language and art in defining the human condition, the nature of human consciousness, and even artificial intelligence.
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A provocative and fascinating look at new discoveries about the brain that challenge our ethics
The rapid advance of scientific knowledge has raised ethical dilemmas that humankind has never before had to address. Questions about the moment when life technically begins and ends or about the morality of genetically designing babies are now relevant and timely. Our ever-increasing knowledge of the workings of the human brain can guide us in the formation of new moral principles in the twenty-first century. In The Ethical Brain, preeminent neuroscientist Michael S. Gazzaniga presents the emerging social and ethical issues arising out of modern-day brain science and challenges the way we look at them. Courageous and thought-provoking -- a work of enormous intelligence, insight, and importance -- this book explores the hitherto uncharted landscape where science and society intersect.
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What happened along the evolutionary trail that made humans so unique? In his accessible style, Michael Gazzaniga pinpoints the change that made us thinking, sentient humans different from our predecessors. He explores what makes human brains special, the importance of language and art in defining the human condition, the nature of human consciousness, and even artificial intelligence.
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Why does the human brain insist on interpreting the world and constructing a narrative? In this ground-breaking work, Michael S. Gazzaniga, one of the world's foremost cognitive neuroscientists, shows how our mind and brain accomplish the amazing feat of constructing our past--a process clearly fraught with errors of perception, memory, and judgment. By showing that the specific systems built into our brain do their work automatically and largely outside of our conscious awareness, Gazzaniga calls into question our everyday notions of self and reality. The implications of his ideas reach deeply into the nature of perception and memory, the profundity of human instinct, and the ways we construct who we are and how we fit into the world around us.
Over the past thirty years, the mind sciences have developed a picture not only of how our brains are built but also of what they were built to do. The emerging picture is wonderfully clear and pointed, underlining William James's notion that humans have far more instincts than other animals. Every baby is born with circuits that compute information enabling it to function in the physical world. Even what helps us to establish our understanding of social relations may have grown out of perceptual laws delivered to an infant's brain. Indeed, the ability to transmit culture--an act that is only part of the human repertoire--may stem from our many automatic and unique perceptual-motor processes that give rise to mental capacities such as belief and culture.
Gazzaniga explains how the mind interprets data the brain has already processed, making "us" the last to know. He shows how what "we" see is frequently an illusion and not at all what our brain is perceiving. False memories become a part of our experience; autobiography is fiction. In exploring how the brain enables the mind, Gazzaniga points us toward one of the greatest mysteries of human evolution: how we become who we are.
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While we humans point to our big brains and jabber endlessly about how different they make us, other animals seem to remain unimpressed. "Yeah, well, what are they good for?" they'd ask if they could. After all, evolution has been no kinder to us than to them--all of us have had the same amount of time to get where we are, and all of us do just fine eating and reproducing. Are our brains really more valuable to us than teeth to a shark or wings to a bird? This evolutionary view of consciousness could be the key to a better understanding of how we think, and neuroscientist Michael S. Gazzaniga has been helping develop this outlook while working on the frontlines of research. From studies with split-brain patients in the 1960s to the latest tricks of molecular biology today, Gazzaniga shares with us the results of this research and how they are changing the way we think about thinking.
The title of The Mind's Past refers both to the brain's evolution and its construction of personal identity and memory, which offer clues to the puzzle of consciousness. Gazzaniga's refreshingly straightforward, informal prose asks what our brains are good for and shows that some of our most powerful achievements (like language and statistics) might best be thought of as byproducts of systems designed to help us survive and reproduce. The surprising assertion that most of what we believe to be conscious and willful happens before we are aware of it is made plausible and perhaps comforting in this short, very humanistic book. By careful study and reflection on the mind's past, we might be able to learn something of its future. --Rob Lightner
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