MBB Distinguished Lectures with Michael Gazzaniga

Harvard Mind, Brain & Behavior will hold its 2010 Distinguished Lecture Series this week, featuring three evening lectures with Dr. Michael Gazzaniga, psychology professor and director of the SAGE Center for the Study of Mind at the University of California Santa Barbara. All three events look interesting, and the final event has particular relevance to law and mind sciences. All events will be held in Harvard’s Yenching Auditorium, 2 Divinity Ave, Cambridge, MA.

• Tuesday, April 20, 4 to 6 pm
  Building the Parallel Distributed Brain, How Do We Know?
  From Hebb, Lashley, and Sperry, and through modern research, the basics of brain organization are reviewed at both the cellular and neurological level, including a personal history of split-brain research that all lead up to the view of a parallel and distributed brain. Post-talk commentary by Professor Albert Galaburda (Neurology / HMS).

• Wednesday, April 21, 4 to 6 pm
  Automatic Brains, Interpretive Minds
  With a massively parallel and distributed and automatic brain, how is it we believe we experience a unified conscious life? How does the sense of psychological unity become established and how does it work in the brain? Post-talk commentary by Professor Güven Güzeldere (Philosophy / FAS).

• Thursday, April 22, 4 to 6 pm
  Feeling Free in a Mechanistic World: Where the Brain Meets the Law
  The idea of determinism and mechanism rings out from every quarter of science and society. What does this mean for the concept of personal responsibility and how might ideas on the issue impact our ideas of justice and the law? Post-talk commentary by Professor Joshua Greene (Psychology / FAS).

Michael Gazzaniga on Brains and Gavels

In the 66-minute video below, Carl Zimmer interviews Michael S. Gazzaniga, Professor of Psychology, University of California at Santa Barbara & Director of the MacArthur Foundation’s Law & Neuroscience Project. It’s worth watching.

Vodpod videos no longer available.

Here is the video’s table of contents provided by Bloggingheads:

Mike’s project to connect law with neuroscience (13:59)
Why normal people sometimes make horrible choices (07:54)
How to be morally responsible—and causally determined (11:49)
Becoming your future self (06:48)
Poverty as a neurotoxin (12:51)
Left-brain, right-brain, split-brain (11:28)

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To read a sample of related Situationist posts, see “Greely on Law and Neuroscience,” “Jurors, Brain Imaging, and the Allure of Pretty Pictures,” “Neurolaw Sampler,” “Law & the Brain,” “The Split Brain and the Interior Situation of Theories of the Self,” “Our Interior Situations – The Human Brain,”and “Your Brain and Morality.”

The Split Brain and the Interior Situation of Theories of the Self

The following (5 minute) video demonstrates the effects of split brain surgery where the corpus collusum is severed. The effects are explained by Dr. Michael Gazzaniga.

From Youtube: “To reduce the severity of his seizures, Joe had the bridge between his left and right cerebral hemisphers (the corpus callosum) severed. As a result, his left and right brains no longer communicate through that pathway. Here’s what happens as a result.”

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To watch a (3.5 minute) clip from Situationist contributor Phil Zimbardo’s program, Discovering Psychology, in whcih Michael Gazzaniga discusses the essential role of the “interpreter” in creating in each of us a unique sense of self.

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Below you can watch an vintage (11 minute) video in which a very young Dr. Gazzaniga goes into detail regarding his early split-brain research on animals and humans (includes a fascinating example of how the right and left hands of a split-brain patient squabble with one another as if hands from two different individuals).

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For a sample of related Situationist posts, see “Our Interior Situations – The Human Brain,” “Learning to Influence Our Interior Situation,” “It’s All In Your (Theory of the) Mind,” “Smart People Thinking about People Thinking about People Thinking,” “Vilayanur Ramachandran On Your Mind,” “Jonathan Haidt on the Situation of Moral Reasoning,” “Unconscious Situation of Choice,” “The Situation of Reason,” and Part I, Part II, Part III, and Part IV of “The Unconscious Situation of our Consciousness.”

Our Interior Situations – The Human Brain

In today’s Wall Street Journal, Adam Keiper has a review of Michael Gazzaniga’s new book, Human: The Science Behind What Makes Us Unique. Here’s a tiny sample.

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Mr. Gazzaniga is at his best when he is describing his own research with brain-damaged and split-brain patients – that is, patients in whom the tissue between the left and right brain hemispheres has been severed. He tells of one woman who, “although she was being examined in my office at New York Hospital, claimed we were in her home in Freeport, Maine.” A lesion on her brain had left her so convinced that she was really at home that she subordinated any conflicting information. When Mr. Gazzaniga asked her why, if she really were in her house, there were elevators outside the door, she responded: “Doctor, do you know how much it cost me to have those put in?”

By demonstrating the organic origins of our most basic sense of our selves, such stories can challenge our understanding of personhood, agency and identity.

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To read all of the review, click here. You can read excerpt of the book’s prologue and introduction here.  For some related Situationist posts, see “A Closer Look at the Interior Situation” and “Accidentally Us.”