Adding to a growing genre that purports to say how mind arises from
brain, a study that is short and witty but not entirely convincing.
Dartmouth cognitive neuroscientist Gazzaniga (Nature's Mind, 1992)
argues that human brains are composed of distinct, automatic
devices that evolved through natural selection and are already
present in a child at birth. A person's sense that a unified "self"
is in charge of these devices is an illusion created by one of
them, a left-brain gadget he calls the "interpreter." It
manufactures the fictional self by weaving a narrative in which the
self gets credit for issuing orders already executed (moving an
arm, writing a sentence). The author supports his thesis with
accounts of perception and memory experiments, and anecdotes about
brain-damaged patients. Much of this information is entertainingly
conveyed, such as Gazzaniga's critique of the popular notion that
reading to babies helps wire their brains. Some elements of his
argument are dry, others overly familiar, but the book's biggest
flaws are polemical and logical. Too often Gazzaniga argues by
setting up straw men, representing a caricature of theories about
centralized brain functions. He tries to banish questions by
denying them - "no doubt about it" he says about a typically
dubious assertion. Most frustratingly, be insists that the
left-brain interpreter is a "spin doctor" without explaining for
whose benefit the spinning takes place. Who is the little voter
inside the head? Why should the brain construct an illusory self to
persuade the illusory self that it is in control? Maybe Gazzaniga
has an answer; if so, he should reveal it. On the other hand, this
kind of argument may ultimately be a dead end - a figment of the
late 20th century scientist's need to explain the mind entirely as
a product of the physical brain. An intriguing theory, assertively
stated, but often Gazzaniga's arguments seem too reductive or
dogmatic to be convincing. (Kirkus Reviews)
Why does the human brain insist on interpreting the world and
constructing a narrative? In this ground-breaking work, Michael S.
Gazzaniga, one of the world's foremost cognitive neuroscientists,
shows how our mind and brain accomplish the amazing feat of
constructing our past - a process clearly fraught with errors of
perception, memory, and judgment. By showing that the specific
systems built into our brain do their work automatically and
largely outside of our conscious awareness, Gazzaniga calls into
question our everyday notions of self and reality. The implications
of his ideas reach deeply into the nature of perception and memory,
the profundity of human instinct, and the ways we construct who we
are and how we fit into the world around us. Over the past thirty
years, the mind sciences have developed a picture not only of how
our brains are built but also of what they were built to do. The
emerging picture is wonderfully clear and pointed, underlining
William James' notion that humans have far more instincts than
other animals. Every baby is born with circuits that compute
information enabling it to function in the physical world. Even
what helps us to establish our understanding of social relations
may have grown out of perceptual laws delivered to an infant's
brain. Indeed, the ability to transmit culture - an act that is
only part of the human repertoire - may stem from our many
automatic and unique perceptual-motor processes that give rise to
mental capacities such as belief and culture. Gazzaniga explains
how the mind interprets data the brain has already processed,
making 'us' the last to know. He shows how what 'we' see is
frequently an illusion and not at all what our brain is perceiving.
False memories become a part of our experience; autobiography is
fiction. In exploring how the brain enables the mind, Gazzaniga
points us toward one of the greatest mysteries of human evolution:
how we become who we are.
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