So, some friends and I started something called the Graduate Committee for Political Education. We were tired of all the liberal speakers who were routinely invited to Caltech. Where were the conservatives? We knew Caltech wouldn’t come along quickly or quietly, so we started our own outside group, rented a public auditorium in nearby Monrovia, and arranged for the young enfant terrible on the right, William F. Buckley Jr., to give an evening lecture. Buckley was the brash editor of the new conservative magazine National Review and someone who could stir the pot with wit and a touch of irreverence. My two other friends, sassy lawyers from Harvard who had jobs in Los Angeles, and I thought we were pretty cool, even bizarre. But, once committed, we worked it hard. When Barry Goldwater visited Caltech I was introduced to him and asked him if he would agree to help promote the lecture event. He did (Figure 6).
FIGURE 6. Senator Barry Goldwater visited Pasadena and hinted that he would promote our first lecture by a conservative.
(Courtesy of the author)
I met Bill the day before the talk at the home of his sister-in-law, who headed the local Red Cross chapter and lived in Pasadena. It was a poolside lunch with, I will never forget, onion sandwiches. Now, have you ever had an onion sandwich? Bill was quick to put me at ease, even at his boyish age of thirty-six. We chatted about anything from his sister-in-law’s sandwiches to John F. Kennedy. I remember using the word potentiate, which is a common one in pharmacology, and him informing me that no such word existed in the English language. That was the last and only time that I was right in a dispute between the two of us that had to do with language.
That weekend, a friendship was born that survived more than fifty years. Once again I learned that nonscientists wanted to learn more about science. While I wanted to know about politics, he wanted to know about brains, about drug use, about computers, about what was being discovered about life! Little did I know then that over his lifetime I would be one of his contacts, his scouts for scientific knowledge. While I was enthralled with every tidbit he uttered about politics, he wanted conduits to scientific thinking and I gave him these.
Bill was naturally friendly and unflaggingly generous, though I believe he had no concept of the many implicit gifts he gave his friends. Most of my close friends are in science, which is to say that they reflexively try to dissect assumptions on scientific claims. Yet, as a group, they are not prone to applying those skills to social and political agendas, let alone doing it with wit. Bill challenged everything, but always with a grin and with humor. His was a disposition that made it hard for others to rattle his resolve. He always was on top of things with the big picture. Expressing that attitude about life served those who knew him in ways that I don’t think he ever fully appreciated. It surely influenced how I dealt with my academic friends the rest of my life. I learned that holding a minority view can be fun, and that if it is done in good spirit, those around you can have fun as well. Overall, Bill was a risk taker, yet prudent and mannered. He once told me he didn’t like to meet people he admired because they invariably disappointed in person. Gregarious yet private, Bill never disappointed.
Soon after the lecture in Monrovia, I discovered that there was a bit of Sol Hurok* in me. A couple of weeks after that evening’s great success, we decided to go big time. Why not arrange a series of debates on the American Constitution? Why not put out a book?14 Why not have some fun? So I asked Bill if he would lead off such a series debating Steve Allen on the American presidency. He said, “Sure.” Then I asked if he would write to Steve Allen, since I didn’t know him yet. “Sure,” he said, adding that Allen’s wife, Jayne Meadows, had grown up in his hometown. Bill wrote the letter, Steve said yes, and within a couple of weeks, I had arranged for two other debates. I had Robert Hutchins, former president of the University of Chicago, a post he attained at the age of thirty, debating Bill’s brother-in-law, L. Brent Bozell, another lawyer and ghostwriter for Barry Goldwater’s Conscience of a Conservative, about the Supreme Court. Finally, somehow I had arranged for James MacGregor Burns, one of JFK’s biographers, to debate Willmoore Kendall, the maverick conservative political theorist who had been fired by Yale. Their topic was the Congress. I don’t know what I was thinking. A few weeks later, I realized I had signed contracts for auditoriums and speakers that totaled more than ten thousand dollars. The Graduate Committee for Political Education had two hundred dollars to its name.
By the morning of the first debate, which was to be held at the huge Hollywood Palladium, only two hundred people had purchased tickets, some of which had been peddled by my little sister at her junior high school. Steve had taped his TV show the night before with Bill as a guest. They had warmed up for their debate about JFK, but the show wouldn’t air for two weeks and wouldn’t aid in ticket sales. I was concerned and told Steve. Steve very matter-of-factly said, “Don’t worry, Mike—three thousand people would show up to watch me play tiddlywinks.” I wasn’t convinced. On the way to the event, we had stopped by the house of my wife’s friend, who was in the restaurant business. I had met my wife, Linda, through Sperry’s student Colwyn Trevarthen, and his wife, who came from a longtime Pasadena family. Linda also had been raised in Pasadena. Her family knew the business community, and she was close to many of them. Linda’s friend asked one question: “How are you fixed for change?” Not only was I not fixed for change, but it soon became clear I had no idea what I was doing. He intervened, grabbed his wife, went down to their restaurant, gathered up several hundred dollars of quarters and dollar bills, and helped man the ticket booths at the Palladium. As it turned out, three thousand people bought tickets that night, and two of them were Mr. and Mrs. Groucho Marx. Dozens of other limousines and Rolls-Royces pulled up for the big event to buy those tickets for $2.75.
Backstage, Bill and his entourage waited in one room, and Steve and his supporters waited in another. Since it was to be a debate, there would be prepared opening statements, but following those, the participants were to think on their feet. Bill Buckley did this better than anyone, and in that sense it was an unfair match. But Steve had prepared as if for war. To guard against freezing up, he had prepared remarks for his rebuttal as well, just in case.
Out front, the crowd was boisterous. This was going to be the event of the century: Steve Allen, head of SANE, the movie-community chapter of the national antinuclear activist group, and Hollywood’s favorite liberal, pitted against William F. Buckley Jr., American’s leading conservative, who was ready to tell the Soviets that we would nuke them if they made a false move. They were going to march through JFK’s foreign policy and examine it from Vietnam, to Cuba, to the Soviet Union. When the debaters took to the stage (Figure 7), the crowd rose to their feet and cheered them into battle. Homer Odum, a local news show host who had also helped me promote the show, took charge as moderator. I walked to the very back of the auditorium in a stunned state. What had I done? There were only two security guards.
FIGURE 7. More than three thousand of Los Angeles’s most politically active citizens from both the left and right came to see the battle of wits between William F. Buckley Jr. and Steve Allen at the Hollywood Palladium.
(Courtesy of the author)
Luckily, the rest of the evening took care of itself. Here were two great showmen arguing their views. At one point, Buckley spotted Groucho Marx, who was seated in the front row. Sensing that the crowd needed a little jolt, he, without blinking, incorporated the opportunity into his rebuttal. He stared at Steve Allen and exclaimed, “Let’s face it, Steve, President Kennedy’s foreign policy might as well have been written by the Marx Brothers.” Now, most folks hadn’t noticed Groucho’s presence. He stood up on cue, walked up onstage, and strolled across to thunderous applause, raising and lowering his infamous eyebrows and smoking his cigar all the while.
The blossoming Sol Hurok in me lives on. Over the ensuing years, I am not sure I would have taken on my many professional projects of promoting ideas and debates if I hadn’t had this experience unde
r my belt. There is something very intoxicating about taking an empty space and then populating it with vibrant events. Maybe it all helps to ward off ennui. While that turned out to be the only political foray of my life, the dozens upon dozens of scientific meetings I have organized surely grew out of this experience. If done properly, intimate discussions or public debates bring out what people are really thinking. At a minimum, it taught me how the translation of complex topics into the public dialogue worked.
This was the rich and vibrant stew I was living in when all of the science, which makes up the core of this book, was first initiated. Some of the influences came from family, some from the incomparable mystique of Caltech, some from the people of Caltech, some from the people of greater Los Angeles, and some from the incredible good luck of being given an opportunity to study the most fascinating humans on earth.
IN THE FIFTY YEARS since the first studies on Case W.J., which I will describe along with many others, I have studied many neurologic patients with all kinds of illuminating conditions. Of all those patients, this book will focus on the six split-brain patients who have changed how we think about how the brain carries out its work. These patients are extraordinary in every sense of the word and were not only the center of my scientific life, but a big part of my personal life and the lives of the dozens of fellow scientists who studied them as well (Figure 8). While some have now died, others live on and remain very special people. They are the story and in many ways give the story its very structure. Even with their brains divided for medical reasons, they conquered life with singular purpose and will. How they did this reveals secrets about how those of us without the operation accomplish it as well.
FIGURE 8. The patients who have devoted so much of their time to our studies over the past fifty years. In the top row (left to right) are the founding cases from Caltech: Cases W.J., N.G., and L.B. In the bottom row (left to right) are the cases from the East Coast series: P.S., J.W., and V.P.
(Courtesy of the author)
CHAPTER 2
DISCOVERING A MIND DIVIDED
If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants.
—ISAAC NEWTON
MSG: Fixate on the dot.
W.J.: Do you mean the little piece of paper stuck on the screen?
MSG: Yes, that is a dot. . . . Look right at it.
W.J.: Okay.
I make sure he is looking straight at the dot and flash him a picture of a simple object, a square, which is placed to the right of the dot for exactly 100 milliseconds. By being placed there the image is directed to his left half brain, his speaking brain. This is the test that I had designed that had not been given to the Akelaitis series of patients.
MSG: What did you see?
W.J.: A box.
MSG: Good, let’s do it again. Fixate the dot.
W.J.: Do you mean the little piece of tape?
MSG: Yes, I do. Now fixate.
Again I flash a picture of another square but this time to the left of his fixated point, and this image is transmitted exclusively to his right brain, the half brain that does not speak.* Because of the special surgery W.J. had undergone, his right brain, with its connecting fibers to the left hemisphere severed, could no longer communicate with his left brain. This was the telling moment. Heart pounding, mouth dry, I asked:
MSG: What did you see?
W.J.: Nothing.
MSG: Nothing? You saw nothing?
W.J.: Nothing.
My heart races. I begin to sweat. Have I just seen two brains, that is to say, two minds working separately in one head? One could speak, one couldn’t. Was that what was happening?
W.J.: Anything else you want me to do?
MSG: Yes, just a minute.
I quickly find some even more simple slides that project only single small circles onto the screen. Each slide projects one circle but in different places on each trial. What would happen if he were just asked to point to anything he saw?
MSG: Bill, just point to what stuff you see.
W.J.: On the screen?
MSG: Yes and use either hand that seems fit.
W.J.: Okay.
MSG: Fixate the dot.
A circle is flashed to the right of fixation, allowing his left brain to see it. His right hand rises from the table and points to where the circle has been on the screen. We do this for a number of trials where the flashed circle appears on one side of the screen or the other. It doesn’t matter. When the circle is to the right of fixation, the right hand, controlled by the left hemisphere, points to it. When the circle is to the left of fixation, it is the left hand, controlled by the right hemisphere, that points to it.* One hand or the other will point to the correct place on the screen. That means that each hemisphere does see a circle when it is in the opposite visual field, and each, separate from the other, could guide the arm/hand it controlled, to make a response. Only the left hemisphere, however, can talk about it. I can barely contain myself. Oh, the sweetness of discovery (Video 1).
Thus begins a line of research that, twenty years later, almost to the day, will be awarded the Nobel Prize.
Take any one time frame from life where many people are involved, and when they retell the story, all participants will have their own version of what went on. I have six children, and Christmas break is a time when the troops all arrive home. Listening to them reminisce about childhood, it is astounding how unique their recall is of the exact same events. The same is true for all of us in our professional lives. While the factual aspects of scientific studies were going on, what was occurring in the background story? Of course, there was more to that magic moment with W.J. than just the two of us.
A DARING DOCTOR AND HIS WILLING PATIENT
Bogen was the bright and persuasive young neurosurgeon who pushed along the idea of carrying out the human split-brain procedure (Figure 9). He also was responsible for finding the first case. I could explain how that came to be, but much better are his own words recalling the patient and those early days. From the beginning the revolutionary impact of Case W.J. is evident:
I first met Bill Jenkins in the summer of 1960 when he was brought to the ER in status epilepticus;* I was the neurology resident then on call.† The heterogeneity as well as the intractability and severity of his multicentric seizure disorder became clearer to me over the next months. Both in the clinic and in the hospital I witnessed psychomotor spells, sudden tonic falls, and unilateral jerking, as well as generalized convulsions. In late 1960, I wrote to Maitland Baldwin, then Chief of Neurosurgery at the NIH [National Institutes of Health] in Bethesda, Maryland. A few months later, Bill was admitted to the NIH epilepsy service where he spent 6 weeks. He was sent home in the spring of 1961, having been informed that there was no treatment, standard or innovative, available for his problem.
Bill and his wife Fern were then told of Van Wagenen’s‡ results, mainly with partial sections of the cerebral commissures. I suggested that a complete section might help. Their enthusiasm encouraged me to approach Phil (my chief), because of his experience with removal of callosal arteriovenous malformations. He suggested that we practice a half-dozen times in the morgue. By the end of the summer (during which I was again on the neurosurgery service), the procedure seemed reasonably in hand. My plea to Sperry was that this was going to be a unique opportunity to test a human with the knowledge from his cat and monkey experiments and that his direction of the research was essential. He pointed out that a student about to graduate from Dartmouth had spent the previous summer in the lab and would be eager to test a human. Mike Gazzaniga started his graduate study in September and was, as Sperry said, eager to test a human subject. He and I soon became friends, and planned together experiments to be done before and after the surgery. There was some delay before the operation, during which Bill underwent testing in Sperry’s laboratory. During this delay we also had an opportunity to keep a reasonably complete record of Bill’s many seizures.
It was during this perio
d of preoperative testing that Bill said, “You know, even if it doesn’t help my seizures, if you learn something it will be more worthwhile than anything I’ve been able to do for years.” He was operated on in February, 1962. It seems to me in retrospect that, if there had been a research committee at our hospital whose multimember approval was required, the procedure would never have been done. At that time, a chief of service could make such a decision alone, which I expect was similar to the situation at the University of Rochester in the late 1930s.1
FIGURE 9. Joseph E. Bogen, M.D., was the neurosurgical resident who persuaded his chief of surgery, Peter Vogel, to carry out the first modern-day split-brain surgeries. Joe was a restless intellectual with a great gusto for life and brought a valuable medical perspective to the project.
(Courtesy of the author)
SCIENCE THEN AND NOW
Life was simple back in 1961. Or so it seems now. It was a time when people went off to college, studied hard, went to graduate school, did a thesis, got a postdoctoral fellowship, then got an assistant professorship somewhere. They spent their life pursuing their intellectual interests. Today, the choices are not so clear-cut, and more graduating Ph.D.s go into industry, outreach programs, start-ups, foreign research organizations, and more. Most of one’s colleagues are from or have spent time abroad. All of this is fabulous, too, but different and more socially complex.
Tales from Both Sides of the Brain : A Life in Neuroscience (9780062228819) Page 4