Tales from Both Sides of the Brain : A Life in Neuroscience (9780062228819)

by Gazzaniga, Michael S.

  MSG: . . . are colors involved in it?

  J.W.: Yeah, red, yellow . . . traffic light?

  MSG: You got it.25

  The anterior callosum was beginning to yield its secrets. Somehow the right hemisphere was passing forward to its more cognitive parts what we thought were the more abstract aspects of the line drawing. Somehow the various associations yoked to a picture of a black-and-white drawing of a traffic light were activated, and the parts of the brain supporting those more forward-based functions still had their callosal connections. These associations were prompted by the game of twenty questions I was playing with J.W., the game that was being managed by the left hemisphere. The anterior part of the callosum dealt with higher-order information, not the primitives of the actual stimulus. Again, it wasn’t a representation of the actual image: It was other gnostic associations that the left hemisphere was receiving from the right and trying to find words for.

  Still, one could argue that nothing was actually being transmitted across the callosum. Instead, maybe the left hemisphere was simply being cued by the isolated right hemisphere in this fashion: When I ask, “Does it have to do with cars?,” the right hemisphere hears “cars,” which are associated with a traffic light, and so nods yes. The left hemisphere notes that the head nods yes and goes along with the cue and says “yes.” Then I ask, “Are colors involved?” and again the right hemisphere associates colors with the traffic light and once again nods yes. Now the left hemisphere knows: “cars” and “colors.” Quickly, all on its own, it figures out what the picture to the opposite hemisphere must have been, just as anyone might have done by listening to the exchange. This argument proposes then that nothing actually transferred through the anterior callosum. Instead, perhaps, utterly separate and independent modules are cueing each other, just like two people cue each other with the wink of an eye.

  But things kept changing with J.W. The traffic light account came early on after his first surgery. As time elapsed, we saw that J.W. could play the “twenty questions” test with himself without outside direction. Another change came about eight weeks into the period between the first and second surgeries. We flashed the word Knight to the right hemisphere. Here is the dialogue he had with himself: “I have a picture in my mind but I can’t say it. Two fighters in a ring . . . ancient, wearing uniforms and helmets . . . on horses trying to knock each other off . . . Knights?” The word Knight elicited all of these higher-order associations in the right hemisphere. These were being communicated externally through speech and hearing over to the left, which picked up the parts and then solved the problem.26 This was extraordinary and made even more so by the fact that following his second surgery, which completed the full section of the callosum, he could never again succeed in naming words and pictures presented to the right hemisphere. At least he couldn’t until something else changed, but that comes later (chapter 7).

  ONLY THE LEFT BRAIN SMILES TO COMMAND

  The patients were and are endlessly fascinating, and our testing program was incessant. Everyone knew each other, and the patients were as supportive of us as we were of them. My wife, Charlotte, was a big part of the glue that kept it all working. Patients would ask for her even when it wasn’t one of her days to test. On those days, Charlotte would still be part of the group that took a patient out to dinner. Or, if there was a birthday for a patient’s child, Charlotte would remember, and a present would arrive at the lab for the patient to take home. Charlotte’s naturally hospitable Texas ways were always there. And just as the patients needed to feel at home and comfortable, so did the visiting scientists. I can’t count the number of dinners Charlotte cooked, and all of this while making use of her own training in neuropsychology and doing her own experiments. The social aspects of a life in science are considerable and extremely important if the science deals with people. In the days of the traveling van, she somehow would transform the testing area into a dining room and serve a four-course dinner that miraculously emerged from the small oven and stovetop! It was—like it sounds—magical, as is she.

  Charlotte had been reading up on a curious fact about the anatomy associated with voluntary versus involuntary smiling. The brain has allocated these two very different skills to different brain systems. When you smile voluntarily, when you are asked to smile, the act is controlled from the left hemisphere. It involves the cortical neurons that cross over to the right half of the face and also the cortical neurons that cross through the callosum. There they activate other cortical neurons that ultimately activate the left half of the face. This all happens very quickly, such that when that smile comes out, it looks perfectly symmetrical. If a stroke has damaged any part of this cortical pathway’s network, however, there can be a corresponding droop in the smile, depending upon where the lesion occurs.

  Spontaneous smiles are different. They utilize a totally different neurologic hardware that is diffuse and arises mostly out of the subcortex and something called the extra-pyramidal system. When you hear a good joke, this is the system that kicks in and produces the giggly face. Why is it that gramps, who suffers from Parkinson’s disease, looks so deadpan? Because his disease damages that extra-pyramidal system, with the unfortunate result that he can no longer smile spontaneously.

  Charlotte reasoned that our patients should reveal this, if we tested the idea properly. We knew how to ask the question: simply flash a command to either the left or right hemisphere and record on video the response. By pointing a video camera right at the face, we thought we should be able to pick up a possible difference in which part of the face first responded. A flash of the command to smile to the left hemisphere ought to find the right side of the face commencing the smile, followed by the left side. Or a flash of the command to the right hemisphere should find the opposite, the left half of the face moving first, if the right hemisphere could carry out the command. Sounds easy but, of course, there was a hitch. The video camera we had at the time couldn’t capture the frames fast enough to see these split-second differences.

  I had been toying with the idea of buying a Panasonic digital videodisc recorder. Several other projects in the lab, including our brainprinting project, needed a way to store large amounts of data. This video camera could not only do that, it could also capture information at a much faster frame speed and could play it back frame by frame. Would this do the trick?

  Charlotte and I hooked it all up and started testing J.W., V.P., and D.R. It worked perfectly. Take J.W. as an example. Sure enough, when the command to smile was projected to the left hemisphere, his right half face led the smile, followed quickly by the left (Video 13). It was amazing to see, and we were anxious to see what the right hemisphere could do. To our enormous surprise, the right hemisphere couldn’t carry out the command, period. Initiating a voluntary smile was not an option for the right hemisphere.27 Yet it had no problem following the commands “wink” and “blow.” At the same time, the patients had no problem spontaneously smiling to a joke or other natural situation. The subcortical control system had not been affected by the split-brain surgery.

  THE ALLURE OF A RESEARCH UNIVERSITY

  It was a time in my career when I wondered about a role in leading a larger effort, something much bigger than my own lab. Johns Hopkins had been on the hunt for someone to lead a new mind/brain program they were initiating. After a few visits and late-night phone calls, it didn’t work out. In the end, we had different ideas about who should be hired as part of the new effort. I knew at the time that if I started to propose specific names, there would be a reaction. There always is. I had held off revealing my list of candidates until one night the chair of the committee found me by phone in a hotel in Los Alamos, New Mexico. We were down to the wire, but I reiterated my reluctance to name specific people. While I do act independently, I always consult with my colleagues beforehand. I told the chair that this was what I would do. He persisted, and, finally, I mentioned a few names. He thanked me and that was that. I never heard from them again.


  Still, this had triggered in me an arousal for bigger things. When I finally decided to take an offer from the University of California, Davis, I was ambivalent, not surprising given our life in a beautiful place with the rich and vibrant group of colleagues we enjoyed. When the decision was coming to a head, I remember standing at a phone booth at the Society of Neuroscience meeting in New Orleans and calling to check one last time with the provost of Dartmouth, John Strohbehn. There are always counteroffers in the academic world. My request was that the Dartmouth Medical School guarantee all of my salary, not just 50 percent of it. Rough waters were ahead and that seemed prudent as UC Davis was offering a full salary and more of it.

  It came down to a $25,000 difference between the two institutions. That’s it. If the provost had thrown in another 25K toward my salary support, I would have stayed at Dartmouth. For administrative reasons, too difficult and too unimportant to review, he couldn’t do it. Strohbehn was, at heart, a terrific provost, a bioengineer who worked with Dave Roberts on the MRI-driven microscope. He wanted to make it work. I thanked him for the call and his efforts and hung up the phone and stared at the ground for a good five minutes. Okay, I thought, that’s it. We are moving to Davis.

  I called Charlotte and let her know. She was supportive as always, yet I could detect the strain. We had lived in our personally designed and built home for only two years. The pinewood-framed windows with hardwood floors and brick fireplaces, along with the ten acres of Vermont woods, were all going to be history. We had started many traditions in our home, the most notable of which was our dinner parties for both family and visiting scientists. Our dining room was a place of joy and intellect. Were we really leaving all of this for California’s Central Valley? In an effort to soften the blow, I booked a suite at the Auberge du Soleil in Napa, packed up the family, and took off for a quick visit to show how sweet life in California would be.

  The Auberge was everything it was cracked up to be. The Mexican-tiled suites had built-in sofas populated with large pink pillows that were not actually pink but some new designer color that made us all feel hip. In the dead of winter we had drinks by the pool, even though it was a bit cool in the January week we visited. Dinners over at Tre Vigna in St. Helena were sublime, as were visits to various vineyards. There was only one problem. Napa is not Davis! I should not have shown the family Olympus first!

  It all worked out gloriously in the end, even with the difficulties of buying a new home when the old home hadn’t sold. Throughout the process, and I do mean process, Dartmouth kept smiling benevolently upon us. It is disruptive to move, not only for a family, but also for the institutions involved. The one you are leaving is hopefully not happy about it. But when they are not happy, what do they do? In Dartmouth’s case, they threw us a big party and everybody showed up to wish us well, including President James O. Freedman, the provost, and the dean. We were flabbergasted and touched, and, though we were leaving, our attachment to the institution was reinforced.

  PART 3

  EVOLUTION AND INTEGRATION

  CHAPTER 7

  THE RIGHT BRAIN HAS SOMETHING TO SAY

  We are at the very beginning of time for the human race. It is not unreasonable that we grapple with problems. But there are tens of thousands of years in the future. Our responsibility is to do what we can, learn what we can, improve the solutions, and pass them on.

  —RICHARD P. FEYNMAN

  MY MOVE TO THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, DAVIS, IN 1992 began when I met the neuroscientist Leo Chalupa in 1988 at one of my small Moorea-type meetings, which by now I was organizing more frequently. The topic was human brain evolution, and several of the world’s experts were there. Since I only offered a thousand dollars for expenses, the place always had to be the draw. The beckoning place that year was the dreamiest city on earth: Venice. Leo was in full form.

  Arrangements had been made to stay at La Fenice et Des Artistes, a wonderful small and informal hotel close to the famous Teatro. As a favor, my close and longtime friend Emilio Bizzi, a professor at MIT and a foundational scientist for understanding how the brain carries out action, had arranged our meeting place. It was across the street from the hotel at the fabled Ateneo Veneto, which had been inaugurated by Napoleon in 1810 to promote science, arts, and literature. We took over the third-floor library and made arrangements with a local bar/tabacchi to bring us espressos at regular intervals. The meeting sparkled with the likes of Stephen Jay Gould, Terry Sejnowski, a wizard in the new field of neural networks, and regulars such as Jon Kaas and Gary Lynch. The new entrant to the group, Leo Chalupa, is a man who could slide in and have tea with the queen of England at four and leave for a martini with his pals at six. Leo, with his engrained and endearing New York manner and prosody, knows who he is and also, in a profound way, knows who others are. As a mutual friend once said to me, “Leo is the guy who is there for you when others have dumped you on your head.” In addition to his capacity for deep relationships, he is also very funny.

  The meeting had been rolling along for a few days when the time came for Leo to speak. Several of the speakers had mentioned Francis Crick, as in “my buddy Francis Crick.” This is sort of the equivalent of saying, “I am working on this idea, and I have tried it out on Crick. He likes it, so don’t give me too much grief about it.” This sort of stuff doesn’t fly with Leo. Wanting to get his disapproval across without offending anyone, he started off with an old Yiddish joke his father told him when he was six.

  Two guys are walking down the street—neither one of whom is Francis Crick—and one guy says to the other: “I have a riddle for you to test how smart you are.” The other guy says: “Okay, what’s the riddle?”

  “What’s green, is up in the tree, and it sings.”

  “That’s easy, it’s a bird of some type.”

  “Nope, it’s definitely not a bird.”

  After many futile guesses, the second guy says: “Okay. I give up. What’s green, in a tree, and sings?”

  The first guy says: “Simple. It’s a herring.”

  “A herring! How could it be a herring. Herrings aren’t green.”

  “Well, someone painted it green.”

  “But herrings aren’t found in trees.”

  “Well, someone threw it up there.”

  “Okay. But herrings don’t sing!”

  “You’re right. I added that just to make it harder for a smart guy like you to figure out the answer.”

  After the Crick line, I am not sure we heard the rest of the joke. Leo successfully broke the heaviness of what I call “endless consideration,” and the meeting sprang open and became both animated and more interesting. I wanted to know more about Leo.

  As it turned out, a new Center for Neuroscience at UC Davis was being planned, and Leo was chair of the project and part of the search committee for a new director. It was all on paper when we first started talking about it. I was happily settled at Dartmouth and life was good. As time rolls by, however, stuff begins to happen. Leo and I began to run into each other at more scientific meetings and to have more dinners and lunches, “off label,” so to speak. At the huge meetings, such as the annual meeting for the Society for Neuroscience, 20,000–35,000 scientists show up from all around the world. People make a huge effort to meet friends and acquaintances there, but, for the most part, not at the hundreds of individual lectures. Lunches and dinners become heavily booked, during which most of the business gets done.

  The idea behind the new center was to build a point of contact and collaboration for the bustling young field of neuroscience. Leo had asked for ten positions to get it going, and he was seeking a new director, who would also oversee the hiring. There would be new space, new positions, and new funds to get the new hires going. If all the commitments were added up the way private institutions calculate such commitments, it was around a $25 million package. It was indeed a moment to try “big science,” at least in 1992. Leo offered that moment to me.

  During the
visits to Davis to check out the town, the offer, the very idea of the job itself, I met all kinds of new people: the other faculty, the students, and most important for a task like this, the administrators. “Who would be my boss?” I would ask. The dean of biology. “Who would be his boss?” The vice chancellor. “And his boss?” That would be the chancellor. I told Leo, “Better meet them all.” Leo arranged the meetings.

  Davis had some of the best administrators I have ever dealt with in university life: Their word was as good as gold. That was important because in a big organization like the University of California, income streams and assets are totally hidden from simple view. There is no account number you look up to see the actual funds being allocated to your project. Funds for new positions come from one kind of source, funds for start-ups come from another source, funds for new space yet another source, and so on. In a state school, the numbers for each of those categories are constantly moving, ebbing and flowing with the needs of a huge organization. This is why trust is so important, and no one was more trustworthy than Robert D. Grey, the dean of biology at the time of my negotiations. He later became the vice chancellor. A deep believer in land grant universities, he was Kansas born, Scotch sipping, and steady as a rock. He believed in the project and adopted me. His greatest gift was that he took risks. He was not terrified of his faculty. And he went the extra mile on the little stuff, such as convincing his boss, Chancellor Theodore Hullar, to interrupt his Vermont vacation and drop by our home in Norwich. Not surprisingly, I took the job.

  Of course, any suggestion that decisions about moving are wonderfully and completely rational, singular, and decisive in nature is just plain wrong. The emotions are churning while the mind is trying to figure out a logical explanation for uprooting the family from friends and a beautiful home. The friends where you currently work are also pitching for you to stay. I can remember a trip my wife and I made to New York City to visit Stan Schachter, the famous social psychologist. He, among other things, had once insisted on being placed in a four-bed hospital room instead of a single room so that he could watch social interactions when people were ill. Stan poured the drinks and sat us down in his prewar Upper West Side apartment on Ninety-Fourth Street. When in the throes of decisions like this, you are like a cocked gun, ready to go off at any moment about the dilemma to move or not. By the time we had gotten to Stan, the universities had pretty much evened up the competing offers. We were now dealing with the intangibles.