Michael Saunders Gazzaniga (born December 12, 1939) is an American cognitive neuroscientist and professor emeritus of psychology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is the founder and retired director of the SAGE Center for the Study of the Mind at UCSB (2006–2023).
Biography In 1961, Gazzaniga graduated from Dartmouth College with a B.A in zoology. In 1964, he received a Ph.D. in psychobiology from the California Institute of Technology, where he carried out research on human split-brain patients for his doctoral thesis under Roger Sperry. In his subsequent work, Gazzaniga has made advances in research concerning the lateralization of brain function and communication between the left and right cerebral hemispheres.
Career Gazzaniga's academic career began as an assistant professor of psychology at UCSB in 1967. Here he met Colin Blakemore, a graduate student at the University of California Berkeley, with whom he would collaborate with in the future. Together, they edited the Handbook of Psychobiology in 1975. In 1969 he moved to the New York University graduate school as an assistant professor and in 1972 became a full professor. In 1973, he took a position as professor of psychology at the State University of New York at Stony Brook (and later became a professor of social sciences in Medicine). That same year, at the invitation of Dartmouth neurosurgeon Donald Wilson, Gazzaniga began to study a new series of split-brain patients in New Hampshire with his graduate student, Joseph LeDoux. They put together a mobile lab and drove from New York to New Hampshire every month to test what became known as the "east-coast" series of split-brain patients, one of whom was patient P.S. Patient P.S. was the first split-brain patient whose right hemisphere could read. It could not speak, but it could spell out answers to questions (see Patient P.S. below). Gazzaniga first formulated his theory of the left hemisphere's interpreter at this time. After he received his doctorate, LeDoux turned his research efforts to the subject of emotion.
In 1977 Gazzaniga was offered a job at Cornell University Medical College when Fred Plum, the chairman of the neurology department, decided his residents needed some schooling in neuropsychology. He appointed Gazzaniga as the director of the Division of Cognitive Neuroscience and a professor of neurology and psychology, where he stayed until 1988.
Meanwhile, in 1978, he and his good friend and colleague from Rockefeller University, Professor of Psychology George A. Miller, launched a new field of study by first giving it a name: Cognitive Neuroscience. Cognitive neuroscience integrates the methods of cognitive psychology with those of systems neuroscience to help understand how mental processes emerge from neural activity. With a small grant from the Sloan Foundation, Gazzaniga established the Cognitive Neuroscience Institute to begin a new program focused on research and on teaching the brain mechanisms involved with cognitive processes.
With continued funding from the Sloan Foundation, Gazzaniga extended the Cornell program to include a consortium of New York City universities to help establish the growing field of cognitive neuroscience and began a postdoctural training program. In 1982 he was elected Fellow of the Society of Experimental Psychologists in recognition for his studies on split-brain patients. In 1988, still making monthly trips to New Hampshire in the mobile camper lab, he was offered a professorship at Dartmouth Medical School.
From 1988 to 1992, he was the Andrew W. Thomson Jr. Professor of Psychiatry and the director of the Cognitive Neuroscience Program at Dartmouth Medical School. During that time, Gazzaniga founded the first cognitive neuroscience degree-granting program in the United States, founded and served as the first editor-in-chief of the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience through 2003, and with help from the James S. McDonnell Foundation, initiated and ran the Summer Institute in Cognitive Neuroscience at Dartmouth. The summer camp brought together cognitive neuroscience graduate students, postdoctoral researchers, and leaders in the various fields of cognitive neuroscience for a 2 week lecture and laboratory course each summer on a cutting edge topic.
After his time at Dartmouth Medical School, Gazzaniga moved to the University of California Davis in 1992 where he launched and served as the first Director of the Center for Neuroscience, where he continued to expand his pioneering research on brain function and cognitive processes.
In 1993, he founded, along with George R. Mangun, Steve Pinker, Patricia Reuter-Lorenz, Daniel Schacter and Art Shimamura, the Cognitive Neuroscience Society, a professional organization dedicated to advancing the field. The inaugural meeting was held in San Francisco in 1994. 1993 also marks the first summer that a 3 week stock-taking of the sub-specialty fields of cognitive neuroscience began. Eight leaders in each of the fields were invited for an intense meeting of self-examination and to write a chapter about their work. This stock-taking of the field continues to occur every 5 years. The result is the 6 volume series, The Cognitive Neurosciences, published by MIT Press.
In 1996, he returned to Dartmouth as the David T. McLaughlin Distinguished Professor of Psychological and Brain Sciences and as founding director of the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience. Under his leadership, Dartmouth was the first college to have a functional brain imaging center. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1997. Gazzaniga served as the Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Dartmouth College from 2002 to 2004, while concurrently serving on the President's Council on Bioethics from 2002-2009. In 2005, he was elected to the National Academy of Medicine.
In 2006, Gazzaniga became the founding Director of the Sage Center for the Study of the Mind at UC Santa Barbara (UCSB), a role he took on after his time at Dartmouth. In 2007, The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation appointed him director of The Law and Neuroscience Project, "the first systematic effort to bring together the worlds of law and science on questions of how courts should deal with recent breakthroughs in neuroscience as they relate to matters of assessing guilt, innocence, punishment, bias, truth-telling, and other issues." At UCSB, he continued to lead research efforts in cognitive neuroscience, while fostering the study of the mind's complex relationship with the brain.
In 2009, he delivered the Gifford Lectures on Mental Life at the University of Edinburgh. In 2011, he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences and received honorary doctorates from Dartmouth College and the University of Aberdeen. In 2019, Trinity College Dublin also awarded him an honorary doctorate.
Over the course of his career, Gazzaniga's work has contributed to the development of experimental methods to study hemispheric specialization and the brain's role in cognitive functions such as language, reasoning, and facial recognition.
Gazzaniga's publication career includes books for a general audience such as The Social Brain, Mind Matters, Nature's Mind, The Ethical Brain Human and Who's in Charge?, which is based on the Gifford lectures he presented at the University of Edinburgh in 2009, and Tales From Both Sides of the Brain. He is also the editor of The Cognitive Neurosciences book series published by MIT Press, which features the work of nearly 200 scientists and is a sourcebook for the field. His latest book is entitled The Consciousness Instinct: Unraveling the Mystery of How the Brain Makes Mind, published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2018.
Research
Early research Gazzaniga is known for his work in cognitive neuroscience.American Psychological Association, "Psychology's best," 2008, Vol 39, No. 9, http://www.apa.org/monitor/2008/10/honors.aspx His research with split-brain patients has helped to understand the distinct roles of the left and right hemispheres of the brain. In split-brain patients the corpus callosum, the giant nerve bundle that connects the right and left hemispheres had been severed to limit the transmission of nerve impulses across the brain in the hopes of decreasing previously intractable seizures. The original series of split-brain patients, whose callosotomies had been done in the 1930s in Rochester, New York had been previously tested, and no evidence was found that there was any disruption of the interhemispheric transfer of information after callosotomy. Later, however, Sperry and his graduate student Ron Myers found that severing the corpus callosum in monkeys did block the transfer of information.
As a first-year graduate student at Caltech, Gazzaniga, convinced by the monkey research that transfer of information would be interrupted, began to test the first California split-brain patient (patient W.J.) with a testing procedure that had not been done on the previous series of split-brain patients.https://www.pnas.org/doi/pdf/10.1073/pnas.1417892111
The split-brain: Rooting consciousness in biology Michael S. Gazzaniga He had to present information to one hemisphere only in order for his experiment to work. The anatomy of the optic nerve allowed Gazzaniga to communicate solely to one hemisphere or the other. Visual information flashed to the right side of the visual field of both eyes is sent to the left hemisphere, and visual information flashed to the left side of the visual field of both eyes is sent to the right hemisphere. He designed an apparatus that flashed a letter, number or symbol onto a screen to either the right or left visual field while the patient focused on a central point. By fixating on a central point, the quickly flashed figure (200ms) could be isolated to a particular visual field.Hock, Roger R., "Forty Studies that Changed Psychology Explorations into the History of Psychological Research," Ch. 1 "Biology and Human Behavior", Reading 1: "One Brain or Two?" Copyright 2013, 2009, 2005 by Pearson Education Inc.
Patient W.J. Patient W.J. was a World War II paratrooper, the first of a series of patients that underwent a callosotomy on the West Coast.Wolman, David (14 March 2012), "The Split Brain: A Tale of Two Halves", Nature 483: 260–263(2011), "Interview with Michael Gazzaniga", Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 1224: 1–8