 "Photo: Rachel Adler '12")
Michael Gazzaniga is one of the leaders in the field of cognitive neuroscience, and is currently a professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is perhaps best known for pioneering research in patients who have had their corpus callosum severed to treat severe epilepsy, disconnecting their left and right brain hemisphere. These are known as split-brain patients. Currently, he is the director the Law and Neuroscience Project, and is publishing a book entitled, "Who's in Charge? Free Will and the Science of the Brain". The Mac Weekly sat down with Dr. Gazzaniga before his lecture in Kagin on Wednesday to talk about his influences, where neuroscience is headed, and some of the field's most exciting developments.
TMW: When you were in college, what was going on in the field of neuroscience and what influenced you to think that it was something you wanted to do with your life?
MG: Well my plan was to go to medical school, so I was just taking the normal pre-med curriculum. Then in my junior year, I read an article by Roger Sperry in Scientific American on nerve regeneration. I just thought that was about the coolest stuff I'd ever read. He was at CalTech, which was next door to where I grew up, so I wrote him out of the blue, said I liked his stuff, and asked if he had summer jobs there, if I could carry his water for three months basically. He wrote back and said, "Yeah, we have NSF [National Science Foundation] summer fellowships, why don't you come out and take one?" So I did.
When I got out there the whole lab was very busy doing animal split-brain work that had been discovered and really got going in 1956. I did a little project of figuring out how to anesthetize half the brain of a rabbit. The idea was you'd have one hemisphere of the brain asleep, train the other one on something, and see what would transfer when you woke up the "sleeping" hemisphere. So I did that, and I got the thing to work, and then it was time to go back to school. By then I was hooked. So I applied and got into CalTech, turned down medical school. That was upsetting for my father, since he was a physician and he loved medicine. He'd say, "Why be a Ph.D. when you can hire one [laughs]?" That was his view.
TMW: What was going on in neuroscience back then?
MG: For one it was called something different back then, it was called psychobiology. Neuroscience was coined about ten years later…There was fundamental neuroscience going on in crayfish, studying how synapses and reflexes worked, and there was the animal split-brain work, and then there was the beginning of Hubel & Wiesel's classic work on the basic physiology of the visual system, that was huge. That was all in the early 60s, which really saw the launching of neuroscience, with people studying it not only in lower animals, simple animals, but also primates and cats. The human part was mostly just lesion correlations [seeing the direct effects of brain damage] … very basic, actually.
TMW: In the 40 or 50 years you've been involved in neuroscience, what change do you think was most influential?
MG: For me it coincided with what I was interested in. A big change for the field came in the early 1980s when it became clear that neuro-imaging [ways to see activity in functioning brains] was going to lead the way into new insights into human neurobiology—you were going to be able understand processes in normal brains … That was huge, that really gave birth to the field of cognitive neuroscience … If you took people of my age in various sub-fields of neuroscience … each would give their perspective and see it through those eyes [of this neuro-imaging]. As a whole, it was just an explosion of energy.
TMW: How do you think the field of neuroscience will change most noticeably by the time undergraduates finish their educations and enter it eight years or so from now?
MG: I think it'll be highly math-based and quantitative, and a lot of concepts and tools from engineering will be brought in, like control theory and dynamical systems. We're trying to start a program at UC Santa Barbara about dynamical neuroscience.
TMW: Do you mean making diagrams of nervous system processing and having engineers sort of figure out how it might work?
MG: The engineers have figured it out—they have this whole control theory, [which deals with] how systems interact on different time scales. The problem with neuroscience—one of the problems—is that you have the molecular time scale, you have the systems time scale, you have the behavioral time scale, and you have the cognitive time scale. There are laws and rules going on in each of these layers. How do you coordinate all that to get a large, causal picture of how this thing [the brain] works? Control theorists deal with that problem all the time—how to articulate different parts working in different time courses that produce the whole of whatever it is you're talking about.
is a member of the 
