Summary Of Discovering The Brain

Tales from Both Sides of the Brain written by Michael S. Gazzaniga explores neuroscience that took place within the last 50 years. In his book, Gazzaniga begins telling his own story as a young neuroscientist who was developing a soon to be well known theory on split brains.
Divided into four parts, part one of the book titled “Discovering the Brain” starts out while Gazzaniga wat attending Dartmouth College, and was moving on to Caltech for an internship. At Caltech, Gazzaniga got hooked on the idea of split brain research and was trying to find out if brain hemispheres were able to learn independently. At Caltech, Gazzaniga was also able to work with some of the greats, including the Roger Sperry who mentored Gazzaniga throughout the beginning of his career. Soon after arriving at Caltech, Gazzaniga started working on human patients to test his theory. Throughout his career, he still credits these patients (W.J., N.G., L.B., P.S., J.W., and V.P.) for their devotion to his studies. With W.J. Gazzaniga was able to come up with one of his first realizations that there are two minds present at once by testing how his hemispheres responded to picking up tacks. W.J.’s right hemisphere was showing up its abilities on picking up the tack, while there was no information coming through on what the object he was holding.
By then Gazzaniga believed that the left brain gives us actions, meaning that we have one mind. It was also noted the the right and left hemispheres had different functions. The left, in charge of language and speech, while the right was responsible for visual tasks. Latter on in chapter four, Gazzaniga references a paper he wrote stating that the right hemisphere does in fact have the ability to “read”. In addition, by 1969 it was evident that two half brains were able to interact, appearing to not be