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The Mind's Past
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's 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 how we become who we are.
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's 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 how we become who we are.
208 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1998
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500 people want to read
About the author
Michael S. Gazzaniga
77 books429 followersMichael S. Gazzaniga, one of the premiere doctors of neuroscience, was born on December 12, 1939 in Los Angeles. Educated at Dartmouth College and California Institute of Technology, he is a professor of psychology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he heads the new SAGE Center for the Study of the Mind.
His early research examined the subject of epileptics who had undergone surgery to control seizures. He has also studied Alzheimer's and Parkinson's patients and reveals important findings in books such as Cognitive Neuroscience: The Biology of the Mind.
While many of his writings are technical, he also educates and stimulates readers with discussions about the fascinating and mysterious workings of the brain. Books such as The Social Brain and The Mind's Past bring forth new information and theories regarding how the brain functions, interacts, and responds with the body and the environment.
His early research examined the subject of epileptics who had undergone surgery to control seizures. He has also studied Alzheimer's and Parkinson's patients and reveals important findings in books such as Cognitive Neuroscience: The Biology of the Mind.
While many of his writings are technical, he also educates and stimulates readers with discussions about the fascinating and mysterious workings of the brain. Books such as The Social Brain and The Mind's Past bring forth new information and theories regarding how the brain functions, interacts, and responds with the body and the environment.
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
April 12, 2013
In The Mind's Past, Gazzaniga reminds me of age-old teachings in Buddhism and Advaita. Of course in this he is not out of tune with other neuroscientists. I am reminded of Benjamin Libet, I am also reminded of neurophilosopher Thomas Metzinger, who publishes opinions reminiscent of ancient Eastern views of self and mind. (Not that neurophilosphers intend it, although some borrow from the teachings without acknowledging their sources.) Neuroscience also provides evidence that corroborates some of the teachings.
The essential Eastern teachings focus on everyday life rather than mystical experiences, which come and go. As a single tenet, they tell us that the ego/self is an illusory fabric to be seen through and that there is no character narrating a life story. They go further than Gazzaniga and other researchers/thinkers, but at least in this there is a kind of accord.
As for Libet, his research-findings against free will are famous. Still, I cannot go that far, either for him, or for the East. My view is that the Eastern teachings do not account for a different understanding of self and free will, which holds that decisions are made and we feel ourselves making them. Absent from Libet's study was any actual decision-making. Subjects had only a yes or no to muscle response and no election between various options. The yes or no: Libet pointed out that his subjects could always veto an act. Fact is, decisions are made between various options, not just a yes or no. Libet's research does not nail a lid on the coffin of "agency."
As for free will itself, the question becomes, Free from what? The question is a non-starter, not answerable with empirical data, and the empirical question is, How do we make decisions? (I say this while I know that real questions are not always just empirical.)
Gazzaniga's thesis is that we are puppets controlled by our brains. Our brains are clever indeed, even producing the illusion that a self is in control of its thoughts and actions. This is typical of neuro-research, and such research findings/opinions so disturbed Tom Wolfe that he wrote his well-known "Sorry, But Your Soul Just Died." (See sidebar.)
Gazzaniga is a founder of cognitive neuroscience and has studied brain architecture in terms of the nature of the self. In his book he musters battalions of arguments to show it as an illusory construct. Near the opening he has this to say:
"We think our personal selves are directing the show most of the time. I argue that recent research shows this is not true but simply appears to be true because of a special device in our left brain called the interpreter. This one device creates the illusion that we are in charge of our actions, and it does so by interpreting our past--the prior actions of our nervous system."
An example of illusory control can be found in some epileptics who have had the corpus callosum severed to eliminate their seizures. It connects the right and left brain hemispheres and without it the two do not "talk" to one another. A split-brain patient is shown an image in his left visual field (the left half of what both eyes take in) and cannot name what he has seen. Why? Because speech-control is on the brain's left side and left-field images are sent only to the opposite, right, side of the brain.
Take a split-brain patient and flash a picture to only one side of his visual field. Suppose they flash a picture of a chicken to the right brain only. The patient cannot say what he is seeing because the left hemisphere, the interpreter, controls language, and the right side is severed from it. If asked to point to the chicken picture the patient can do it because the interpreter is not involved.
The interpreter plays tricks to maintain the illusion of control. When the patient's right brain is shown a command like WALK, he begins to walk to the door. When asked why he is leaving, his interpreter has an answer for the researcher: To get a drink of water.
The first chapter of The Mind's Past is titled "The Fictional Self," and addresses the existence of the interpreter in the left hemisphere. The author explains it as a narrator that reconstructs our past and weaves it into a life story. As narrator, it promotes the belief (for Gazzaniga, read "illusion") that we are in control of our story. When reading about it, the term "spin doctor" came to my mind. Yet, most of our neurons fire below the level of consciousness, and as automatic systems work outside our awareness. I do not have to make a deliberate decision on each of these keys as I type.
Titled "Brain Construction," the second chapter would provide a revelation for 18th Century philosophers such as John Locke, who said the mind is a blank slate, or tabula rasa, to be written on by environment. Revelation, in that we have learned so much about the brain that was unknown in Locke's day. For moderns, though, it would provoke argument. Gazzaniga urges that today too much importance has been assigned to environment and neuroplasticity. In his work with obsessive-compulsive patients and neuroplasticity Jeffrey Schwartz would be among those who differed with him. (See Schwartz, Neuroplasticity and The Power of Mental Force.) Divided on simplistic lines, we have here the nature/nurture debate, in which Gazzaniga comes down on the side of nature. He sees in brain modularity and genetically-driven mechanisms a powerful argument for nature.
The third chapter, "The Brain Knows Before You Do," argues against the belief that we are in control. In short, our brain and its mechanisms control cognition as well as behavior, and leave the false impression that they have been controlled, and are not the controllers they are. An illustration in the book shows a brain dragging somebody into the future, while he lags behind in an illusory "now." (In his experiments Benjamin Libet provided evidence that decision to respond happens after the actual response by roughly 500 milliseconds.) Gazzaniga boldly opens the chapter with this declaration: "By the time we think we know something--it is part of our conscious experience--the brain has already done its work. It is old news to the brain, but fresh to us." This puts an end to the self and its belief in control, he in effect says.
Elsewhere in the book he explains that most memories serve the narrative self in that events are reconstructed to support belief in the continuity of self, and personality. Popular lore has memory as a trove of organized recollections and when one part of the brain is stimulated by a modern Wilder Penfield a certain memory sparks up, and with a different part, a different memory. Not so, according to the author. Instead they just help the brain's interpreter.
Gazzaniga probably believes that we will eventually discover the neural correlates of consciousness, and well we may. That still leaves me with David Chalmers' "the hard problem of consciousness": What is it like to be me? What is it like to be you? Consider a totally color-blind person perceiving black/white/grey who has scientifically studied color (wave-lengths, etc.) all her life. At the end of her studies will she be able to appreciate the beauty of flowers in a garden? Such problems have turned Chalmers into a kind of dualist (the universe cannot be reduced to just one thing). Others--Daniel Dennett, for example-- dismiss Chalmers and his hard problem as simply a non-problem. Gazzaniga's faith in the scientific method is heard when he states that the "old" psychology is dead because "the grand questions [of] classical psychology have evolved into matters other scientists can address." In a gracious sweep, he includes various psychologists and their fields.
Eastern religions are anchored in not-knowing, a glue for morality and social fabric. Of that from which all emerges, the Bhagavad-Gita says it "cannot be pierced or burned, made wet or dry," thus indicating these are only words pointing to something beyond concepts. (Nisargadattta: "Fight with all the strength at your disposal against the idea that you are nameable and describable.") That is not the case with science. It is about establishing concepts, about knowing and wanting to know. In reading this book, Tom Wolfe's phrase returned to me again and again. "Sorry, but your soul just died." Wolfe had more than an apology in mind. He sees the far-reaching consequences of the remark. Thomas Metzinger (The Ego Tunnel) expresses concern for ethics and societal health should the idea become widespread that "mind" and "self" are fictions. Still, science must know while scientists ask Why?, and rightly so. Despite that, I remain ambivalent toward our future. In step with the physicists who developed the atomic bomb--and I say this with irony although I am not a Luddite--science marches on.Bookmark and Share
The essential Eastern teachings focus on everyday life rather than mystical experiences, which come and go. As a single tenet, they tell us that the ego/self is an illusory fabric to be seen through and that there is no character narrating a life story. They go further than Gazzaniga and other researchers/thinkers, but at least in this there is a kind of accord.
As for Libet, his research-findings against free will are famous. Still, I cannot go that far, either for him, or for the East. My view is that the Eastern teachings do not account for a different understanding of self and free will, which holds that decisions are made and we feel ourselves making them. Absent from Libet's study was any actual decision-making. Subjects had only a yes or no to muscle response and no election between various options. The yes or no: Libet pointed out that his subjects could always veto an act. Fact is, decisions are made between various options, not just a yes or no. Libet's research does not nail a lid on the coffin of "agency."
As for free will itself, the question becomes, Free from what? The question is a non-starter, not answerable with empirical data, and the empirical question is, How do we make decisions? (I say this while I know that real questions are not always just empirical.)
Gazzaniga's thesis is that we are puppets controlled by our brains. Our brains are clever indeed, even producing the illusion that a self is in control of its thoughts and actions. This is typical of neuro-research, and such research findings/opinions so disturbed Tom Wolfe that he wrote his well-known "Sorry, But Your Soul Just Died." (See sidebar.)
Gazzaniga is a founder of cognitive neuroscience and has studied brain architecture in terms of the nature of the self. In his book he musters battalions of arguments to show it as an illusory construct. Near the opening he has this to say:
"We think our personal selves are directing the show most of the time. I argue that recent research shows this is not true but simply appears to be true because of a special device in our left brain called the interpreter. This one device creates the illusion that we are in charge of our actions, and it does so by interpreting our past--the prior actions of our nervous system."
An example of illusory control can be found in some epileptics who have had the corpus callosum severed to eliminate their seizures. It connects the right and left brain hemispheres and without it the two do not "talk" to one another. A split-brain patient is shown an image in his left visual field (the left half of what both eyes take in) and cannot name what he has seen. Why? Because speech-control is on the brain's left side and left-field images are sent only to the opposite, right, side of the brain.
Take a split-brain patient and flash a picture to only one side of his visual field. Suppose they flash a picture of a chicken to the right brain only. The patient cannot say what he is seeing because the left hemisphere, the interpreter, controls language, and the right side is severed from it. If asked to point to the chicken picture the patient can do it because the interpreter is not involved.
The interpreter plays tricks to maintain the illusion of control. When the patient's right brain is shown a command like WALK, he begins to walk to the door. When asked why he is leaving, his interpreter has an answer for the researcher: To get a drink of water.
The first chapter of The Mind's Past is titled "The Fictional Self," and addresses the existence of the interpreter in the left hemisphere. The author explains it as a narrator that reconstructs our past and weaves it into a life story. As narrator, it promotes the belief (for Gazzaniga, read "illusion") that we are in control of our story. When reading about it, the term "spin doctor" came to my mind. Yet, most of our neurons fire below the level of consciousness, and as automatic systems work outside our awareness. I do not have to make a deliberate decision on each of these keys as I type.
Titled "Brain Construction," the second chapter would provide a revelation for 18th Century philosophers such as John Locke, who said the mind is a blank slate, or tabula rasa, to be written on by environment. Revelation, in that we have learned so much about the brain that was unknown in Locke's day. For moderns, though, it would provoke argument. Gazzaniga urges that today too much importance has been assigned to environment and neuroplasticity. In his work with obsessive-compulsive patients and neuroplasticity Jeffrey Schwartz would be among those who differed with him. (See Schwartz, Neuroplasticity and The Power of Mental Force.) Divided on simplistic lines, we have here the nature/nurture debate, in which Gazzaniga comes down on the side of nature. He sees in brain modularity and genetically-driven mechanisms a powerful argument for nature.
The third chapter, "The Brain Knows Before You Do," argues against the belief that we are in control. In short, our brain and its mechanisms control cognition as well as behavior, and leave the false impression that they have been controlled, and are not the controllers they are. An illustration in the book shows a brain dragging somebody into the future, while he lags behind in an illusory "now." (In his experiments Benjamin Libet provided evidence that decision to respond happens after the actual response by roughly 500 milliseconds.) Gazzaniga boldly opens the chapter with this declaration: "By the time we think we know something--it is part of our conscious experience--the brain has already done its work. It is old news to the brain, but fresh to us." This puts an end to the self and its belief in control, he in effect says.
Elsewhere in the book he explains that most memories serve the narrative self in that events are reconstructed to support belief in the continuity of self, and personality. Popular lore has memory as a trove of organized recollections and when one part of the brain is stimulated by a modern Wilder Penfield a certain memory sparks up, and with a different part, a different memory. Not so, according to the author. Instead they just help the brain's interpreter.
Gazzaniga probably believes that we will eventually discover the neural correlates of consciousness, and well we may. That still leaves me with David Chalmers' "the hard problem of consciousness": What is it like to be me? What is it like to be you? Consider a totally color-blind person perceiving black/white/grey who has scientifically studied color (wave-lengths, etc.) all her life. At the end of her studies will she be able to appreciate the beauty of flowers in a garden? Such problems have turned Chalmers into a kind of dualist (the universe cannot be reduced to just one thing). Others--Daniel Dennett, for example-- dismiss Chalmers and his hard problem as simply a non-problem. Gazzaniga's faith in the scientific method is heard when he states that the "old" psychology is dead because "the grand questions [of] classical psychology have evolved into matters other scientists can address." In a gracious sweep, he includes various psychologists and their fields.
Eastern religions are anchored in not-knowing, a glue for morality and social fabric. Of that from which all emerges, the Bhagavad-Gita says it "cannot be pierced or burned, made wet or dry," thus indicating these are only words pointing to something beyond concepts. (Nisargadattta: "Fight with all the strength at your disposal against the idea that you are nameable and describable.") That is not the case with science. It is about establishing concepts, about knowing and wanting to know. In reading this book, Tom Wolfe's phrase returned to me again and again. "Sorry, but your soul just died." Wolfe had more than an apology in mind. He sees the far-reaching consequences of the remark. Thomas Metzinger (The Ego Tunnel) expresses concern for ethics and societal health should the idea become widespread that "mind" and "self" are fictions. Still, science must know while scientists ask Why?, and rightly so. Despite that, I remain ambivalent toward our future. In step with the physicists who developed the atomic bomb--and I say this with irony although I am not a Luddite--science marches on.Bookmark and Share
September 24, 2018
"The Mind's Past" navigates readers on a riveting journey through the manifold intricacies of the most indispensable organ of the body, the brain. With eloquent language and bemusing imagery, Gazzaniga expounds on the evolutionary trajectory of brain development, as well as the multitude of automatic processes that can be ascribed to our immensely talented neurological systems.
One of the most perplexing yet fascinating topics that Gazzaniga explored was the unconscious nature of a multitude of our actions; our inveteracies become entrenched within our brain's cortical region, thereby allowing us to perform a vast majority of actions without involving the active regions of our brains.
Albeit contemporary scientists excoriate the human brain as an irrational, decrepit organ, incapable of objectively evaluating our milieu to a holistic extent, our anthropomorphic brains are monolithic in dichotomy to those of other animals; in fact, our brains have propelled us to innovate beneficial technological advancements and tools, products of particular properties of the brain that have yet to be observed in less neurologically-buttressed animals.
In summation, this book bequeaths readers with enrapturing wisdom and can be facilely apprehended by neophytes intrigued by the byzantine human brain.
One of the most perplexing yet fascinating topics that Gazzaniga explored was the unconscious nature of a multitude of our actions; our inveteracies become entrenched within our brain's cortical region, thereby allowing us to perform a vast majority of actions without involving the active regions of our brains.
Albeit contemporary scientists excoriate the human brain as an irrational, decrepit organ, incapable of objectively evaluating our milieu to a holistic extent, our anthropomorphic brains are monolithic in dichotomy to those of other animals; in fact, our brains have propelled us to innovate beneficial technological advancements and tools, products of particular properties of the brain that have yet to be observed in less neurologically-buttressed animals.
In summation, this book bequeaths readers with enrapturing wisdom and can be facilely apprehended by neophytes intrigued by the byzantine human brain.
December 12, 2023
In The Mind’s Past, Gazzaniga maintains that the primary function of brains is to enhance reproductive success. The human brain is accordingly a result of evolution through natural selection and it comes with prewired devices that allowed humans to better adapt to their environments. These prewired devices govern much of the operations of the brain in an automatic way. The main argument of the book is that the human brain is primarily automatic, leaving little room to agency. Our sense of control (agency) is established by an “interpreter” mechanism in the left hemisphere. Interpreter acts to make sense of internal neuronal processes and also external stimuli, thereby creating a convincing story for us to feel in control.
May 21, 2021
Poor explanations, at times dreadful prose. Flits all over the place. Avoid.
January 9, 2025
free will seems increasingly unlikely
October 30, 2008
This book is another popular science book that submits to the pressure of having some sort of philosophical proposition to tie it all together, being a scientist Gazzaniga cannot help but state these beliefs as fact and unarguable. But once you get past all the leaps of logic and failings to consider hundreds of years of philosophical writings this is a really great book.
The facts in this book are truly amazing but at the same time the book is incredibly easy to read, therefore this book does exactly what a popular science book should do.
It is a fantastic little addition that is formatted brilliantly complete with illustrations and quotes to introduce each chapter and page numbers that manage to be discrete whilst being half way up the page.
March 3, 2013
Kind of difficult to follow in the beginning, but towards the end it all came together. The title is apparent only after reading through more than three quarters of the book.
January 10, 2019
This is one of my all-time favorite books, and in a larger view than neuroscience.
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews