In the paper, I started out with a summarizing statement that the right hemisphere “could read, remember, write, emote and act all by itself. It can do almost anything the left can do, with admitted limitations in the degree of competence.”14 I went on to say that while some of us focused on this kind of result, others focused on what may still be connected and transferring through lower brain systems, or how each hemisphere might have different cognitive styles of handling the sensory information it received.
It was to all of this, no matter what the current researchers in split-brain work were doing, that MacKay raised the idea of “normative” systems. This old chestnut from philosophy, worked hard by one of MacKay’s countryman, David Hume, stated that beings like humans have certain behaviors and thoughts that are part of the human condition: All that we do is normative, that is, concerned with following the directives of those core preferences and capacities, even though they may be culturally learned.15 MacKay was arguing that this is what people do and that no internal disconnection can change our normative stance on the actions we take. When these philosophical ideas were applied to brains, his views were consistent with the thought straight out of Wikipedia, “Normative statements and norms, as well as their meanings, are an integral part of human life. They are fundamental for prioritizing goals and organizing and planning thought, belief, emotion and action and are the basis of much ethical and political discourse.”16
This sort of thinking and framing of the issue of split brains was novel and seemingly distant from actual experimental studies. But MacKay kept hammering at it with questions: How can each hemisphere have two different prioritizing systems, two different evaluations of a common stimulus? How can one like an orange and the other not like an orange? It was definitely time, again in the Francis Bacon tradition, to leave Il Bambino and get into the lab and see what could be done.
In particular, MacKay wanted to see more direct evidence. He wanted to see both hemispheres ready to act but with each holding different evaluations of the same stimulus. He wanted to see the right hemisphere love PB&Js and the left hate them and the two duke it out for lunch. We first started to get at this with monkey research.
Alan Gibson, a graduate student at NYU who had come with me from UCSB, had the bright idea to make a lesion on one side of the hypothalamus of a monkey. The hypothalamus, which is at the base of the brain, controls much of our eating behavior. What if half of it were damaged? Would a split-brain monkey then be less motivated to act for a food reward when viewing the world through the hemisphere associated with the lesion? Would it act normally when using the other hemisphere? Both hypotheses turned out to be true.17 Each hemisphere seemed to possess its own preference and prioritizing system. Mounting evidence for separate normative systems, but still not enough. We kept after it.
J. D. Johnson, also a graduate student, and I did another experiment on monkeys. I must say this one was pretty clever. Split-brain monkeys were trained to learn a simple visual discrimination through one eye on what is called a fixed reward schedule, or FR 2. This means that on every other learning trial, the half brain viewing the visual task is rewarded if the response is correct. So, rewards come every second trial, not on every trial. Still, the half brain learns the task well, no problem.
Now comes the fun part. While the hemisphere that has learned the problem performs the task, the naïve hemisphere is allowed to view the behavior of the trained hemisphere, but only on the trials where no reward is present. We had already done studies where the naïve hemisphere watched the trained hemisphere when rewards were present on every trial. Under those conditions, the naïve hemisphere learned quickly. But what if the naïve hemisphere watched the other hemisphere perform correctly but without reward? Could it learn under these conditions, too? After all, if the normative system was operating and pervasive, both hemispheres should be tuned in to the fact that the stimulus choice associated with the trained hemisphere’s consistent correct response was tied to a nice reward.
Again the results were striking. Not only was there no suggestion that the naïve hemisphere knew the positive value of correct stimulus; the naïve half brain tried to disrupt the choices of the trained brain.18 It was like another animal fighting over food. What was also emerging was the difference between information playing into normative processes that could remain what we called “cold,” versus information that was “hot,” that is, emotionally laden.
The best example of this had come a few years earlier when we tested Case N.G. in Santa Barbara. In that test, the goal was for the left and right hemispheres to learn, without being told, to choose, say, the numeral “1” when presented with the choice of a “0” and a “1.” In one stage of the experiment, we gave reinforcement only to the left hemisphere by flashing the word right or wrong after the correct or incorrect response. When we did this, the patient’s left hemisphere learned the task quickly, but because the feedback had only been given to the left brain and it did not leak over in some way, the right hemisphere did not learn. In short, it appeared the right hemisphere never got a cue from the left hemisphere about which light to continue to push, so it chose randomly.
In a second stage of the experiment, I admonished the patient for making such a simple mistake (when the right hemisphere was wrong). She blushed and was embarrassed. Emotions are generated from parts of the brain that have not been separated and thus both hemispheres are privy to them. The emotion of embarrassment produced by my admonishments now served as a feedback cue, a negative feedback cue, to the right hemisphere. From that point on, the right hemisphere quickly learned the task in normal time. What was so remarkable, however, is that what the right hemisphere was learning was not what the left hemisphere thought the right hemisphere was learning. Thus, when I asked her, following all of this, how she made her choice, she (her left hemisphere) said she picked the “1.” What her right hemisphere actually had learned instead, however, was not to pick the “0.” Again, her left hemisphere didn’t know what the right had learned, and the right had learned because it had been cued by embarrassment during the training phase.19
NOT ONLY SMART BUT A SMARTY-PANTS
Living in New York provided all kinds of new reinforcements for me, too. My contact with Buckley increased, and he invited me to several of his National Review editorial dinner parties where his senior editors would blow off steam after a hard day of work putting the current issue of the magazine to bed. The Buckleys hosted social occasions several times a week, which for mere mortals would be in the category of “too much.” Most people have thrown dinner parties at some point and have most likely come to the conclusion that they are enjoyable at first, but almost invariably drag on too late, since no one quite knows how to end them. As a result, it usually takes several months for another dinner party to seem like a good idea.
The Buckleys solved the dinner party exit dilemma with elegant precision: The guests arrived at 7:45 and had drinks until 8:15. Dinner was then served until about 9:20, whereupon the company repaired to the living room for coffee and cigars until 9:50. At that point, some confederate in the group made it clear to one and all that it was time to leave. By 10:00, the party was over, Bill went upstairs to write his column for the next day, and everyone was happy. I have adopted the Buckley method to great advantage, although I don’t use the confederate angle. At 9:30 (I am not the night owl that Buckley was), I just tell everybody that it is time to go. Charlotte and I have made dinner parties a big part of our life, and I would venture to say that over the past thirty-seven years, the three hundred or so we have given have played a consequential role in contributing to the field of cognitive neuroscience.
One night in 1971, the schedule at the Buckley’s was thrown off. Daniel Ellsberg had just leaked the Pentagon Papers, the Edward Snowden–scale leak of the day, and Bill and his feisty editors came up with the idea of publishing a spoof on the papers. Since I was sitting in the room, I was assigned to write some memos from Dean Rusk, who had served
as secretary of state from 1961 to 1969, about the Vietnam War. A few years earlier, Bill had rejected and sent back a manuscript that I had submitted for publication in the National Review on the Watts riots with the comment “Return to Mike Gazzaniga in a plain manila envelope” penned at the top. I am sure he was wary about the prospect of my pulling off this assignment, but it turned out to be easy. Speaking in governmentese in memo form was a snap. Years of writing grants and memos in large universities, where the very life of language is squelched, had admirably prepared me to pound out why Rusk thought the war should be ended quickly. All government systems develop acronyms, and so I came up with STW, which meant Short Term Warfare. The alternative, LTW (you got it, Long Term Warfare), was not acceptable to the American people. And on and on.
Bill loved it, and a few days later, the story hit. Walter Cronkite didn’t realize it was a hoax and opened the CBS Evening News with a picture of the cover of the National Review issue about the Pentagon Papers, and calls poured in to the magazine. Somebody called the retired Dean Rusk in Atlanta and read him my memo. He said that although he didn’t recall the memo, he might have written it. I am still not quite sure what Bill had in mind with this whole plan. He was off in Vancouver for two or three days, unavailable for comment. When he arrived home a couple of days later, there was a huge news conference, and in one of the great verbal dodges of all time, he came up with some profound moral reason why he had perpetrated the stunt. I was convinced at that moment that Bill should be elected president of the United States for the sheer fun it would bring. William Randolph Hearst Jr. called the prank “one of the most sensationally successful spoofs in the history of American journalism.”
On a different front, I had convinced Bill he ought to have great mind scientists on his TV show, Firing Line. I mean, how many politicians can you listen to? So he did. First off was a show featuring the great behaviorist B. F. Skinner and my pal Donald MacKay. It was on the nature of personal freedom. Calling it high level would be shooting low even by the usual Buckley standard of erudition. For years, it would be his most popular show. A couple of years later, I convinced Bill to do a series of shows. He got Leon to do one again with Skinner, on the mechanisms of moral development. In another show, Premack and Nathan Azrin, a psychologist who thought anything could be trained into anybody, discussed the limits of behavioral control. I was quite proud to have played a role in getting this kind of discussion on television (Figure 17). More broadly, it showed once again that real cultural leaders, no matter their politics or their background, can play together just fine. That discovery has had a huge influence on my life.
FIGURE 17. My entrepreneurial gene was at it again. I talked Bill Buckley into interviewing my friends on TV, which he did with gusto. The top photograph shows Buckley questioning (left to right) B. F. Skinner and Donald MacKay. In the second photograph (left to right), Nathan Azrin and David Premack are in the hot seat. In the lower photograph, Skinner (center) speaks with Leon Festinger (right).
(Courtesy of the author)
ON THE MOVE AGAIN
The family was growing. With three young, energetic daughters, it was time to try the suburbs. We chose Weston, Connecticut, for a variety of reasons, one of which was its pastoral beauty. Still, it was a two-hour commute each way, each day, which meant four hours of suspended thought. The mornings were fine and, in fact, enjoyable. Hit the station, grab a coffee and the Times, sit back in a comfortable train, and off you go to Grand Central Terminal and a subway ride down to Greenwich Village. The energy level was high, and since everybody else was doing it, it all seemed normal. Coming home at night was another matter.
Fatigue was what got me. The end of the day called for a beer, a copy of the New York Post, and a hope for a seat on the train to Westport, my stop. The train floor becomes sticky with the commuters’ beer, and the belligerence level goes up. All in all, it was not a whole lot different than a German beer hall. Just a few years of this grind did me in.
Out of the blue, I got a call from the State University of New York, Stony Brook, and was asked if I wanted to move there. I immediately said it sounded interesting and went out for the usual job talk and dinner. I liked it all. It too had an excellent department, and was in a beautiful location that would require no commuting. We moved to Stony Brook, on Long Island about sixty miles from Manhattan, that summer.
Just before I left for Long Island and my new life, I got another call, this one from Dr. Ernest Sachs, up at Dartmouth Medical School. He was head of neurology at the time, and he invited me up to give a lecture. I was thrilled. I was to play the role of professor at my old alma mater! It was especially sweet because the very same medical school had rejected my application eleven years earlier, even though I was an undergraduate at Dartmouth and my brother was one of their stellar graduates. It is events like this in one’s past that fall off the story line. What if I had been accepted and gone? There would have been no split-brain work for me. How would that whole story have been different? I believe that things just happen in life, and pretty much after the fact, we make up a story to make it all seem rational. We all like simple stories that suggest a causal chain to life’s events. Yet randomness is ever present.
Of course, even more important when we choose a new course in our lives are the new people we meet as a result. Stony Brook proved a rich experience for me, both scientifically and personally. I was lucky to have a series of outstanding graduate students, in particular Joseph LeDoux, Mr. Creativity and Energy personified. After receiving his Ph.D. with me, he went on almost single-handedly to put the field of the neuroscience of emotion on solid footing. Joe, from southern Louisiana, is a musical Cajun (is that redundant?) at heart and at night grabs his Stratocaster to play with his band, the Amygdaloids. Never far from neuroscience, their CDs are titled Heavy Mental, Theory of My Mind, and All in Our Minds. Had I not taken the job, I might never have had the opportunity to know him.
At any rate, after the lecture at Dartmouth, a young neurosurgeon, Donald Wilson, approached to say he had sectioned the callosums of some patients and would I be interested in studying them (Figure 18). Would I ever! Wilson had started a new series of cases at Dartmouth but nobody was working with them. He too had decided the surgery could help those patients who were not being successfully managed with anti-epileptic drugs. In the California series, both the anterior commissure, which resides deep in the brain, and the corpus callosum were sectioned. He felt the surgery could be improved, in terms of outcomes, if sectioning the small anterior commissure (a small bundle of nerve fibers that, similar to the corpus callosum, joins parts of the two hemispheres) could be avoided. In cutting the anterior commissure, one had to enter structures called the lateral ventricles, a process that sometimes introduced infection.
FIGURE 18. Donald Wilson (left) and David W. Roberts, Wilson’s resident at the time, launched the Dartmouth series of splitbrain patients. Roberts went on to become the head of neurosurgery at Dartmouth and the inventor of a computer-based operating microscope.
(Courtesy of the author)
Wilson also introduced another new technique. Cutting the entire corpus callosum was a long procedure, almost seven hours. He thought it would be less traumatic on the patient to do the surgery in two stages. Thus he cut the posterior half of the callosum and then a few weeks later the anterior half. As I’ll explain, this allowed for some major insights into callosal organization.
I could barely contain myself. I had desperately missed studying split-brain patients and was eager. First, I had to figure out how and where to test the several patients. It soon became clear that I needed to test them in their New England homes, which were spread all over Vermont and New Hampshire. How was that going to work? To get going, I simply decided I would haul testing equipment into their homes and do it like I had done it in Los Angeles. That proved to be short-lived. While there were some notable exceptions, many of the patients lived in remote trailers that did not lend themselves to this sort of t
hing. Then the idea of a trailer was born. I went back home and I bought a Del Rey trailer that I could haul behind the family car. If I remember correctly, it cost fourteen hundred dollars, and a neighbor and I converted it into a lab! Now my mobile lab could be driven anywhere, and we could study the patients in our professional space, leaving the patients’ families to their own private space. Our mobile lab didn’t get its upgrade until years later.
By the time we actually had pulled up stakes in Connecticut and moved to Long Island, the new split-brain testing program was launched. Multiple trips to New England slowly established the fact that a growing and important population of patients was becoming available for testing. There were, nonetheless, major logistical problems. Driving up to New England from Weston was a relatively short affair, while driving from Stony Brook, either indirectly by driving toward New York City and the Throgs Neck Bridge, or by taking the Port Jefferson Ferry, was a challenge. We had traded the family car for an orange van, freshly driven in from California, following a cross-country trip and summer vacation, and it proved to be a lifesaver on more than one icy road trip (Figure 19).
FIGURE 19. The family van/trailer at work in Brattleboro, Vermont. The big orange van hauled around the little trailer to its left. Our trailer plugged into the trailer that Case P.S. lived in for years (far left).
Tales from Both Sides of the Brain : A Life in Neuroscience (9780062228819) Page 14