Dr. Michael Gazzaniga is credited with being one of the researchers to discover, through a series of studies, that the brain’s functions are divided between its right and left hemispheres.
Gazzaniga has a new book, “Who’s In Charge? Free Will and the Science of the Brain” that comes out this month. And timed to its publication, and a recent talk Gazzaniga did at a conference sponsored by the Edge Foundation, The New York Times did a profile of him last week. It had the headline “Decoding the Brain’s Cacophony.”
Now a professor of psychology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, Gazzaniga is raising questions about neuroscience and how it its being used in court.
At the conference, he said that science regarding the brain “will eventually begin to influence how the public views justice and responsibility,” according to The Times.
“Scientists now know that the brain runs largely on autopiot; it acts first and asks questions later, often explaining behavior after the fact,” The Times wrote. “So if much of behavior is automatic, then how responsible are people for their actions?”
The article goes into depth about the series of studies that Gazzaniga was involved in at a very young age at Caltech. Those experiments indicated that the left side of the brain governs intellectual, logical functions; while the right side was the one that made “visual-spatial” connections.
That was the Eureka moment in a day and age when it was widely believed that “specific brain functions like memory were widely — and uniformly — distributed in the brain, not concentrated in discrete regions,” The Times wrote.
Gazzaniga became the founding director in 2007 of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation’s Law and Neuroscience Project, which monitors applications in the legal system.
“In recent years lawyers have begun to present brain images as evidence, usually to mitigate responsibility for a crime or to test veracity of testimony, as in a polygraph; increasingly, those images have been admitted,” The Times wrote. “And more are coming: In imaging studies, for instance, neuroscientists have identified cortical areas that are highly active when people suppress impulses or other behaviors.”
But brain images only reflect one tiny moment in a brain’s state, not what what was happening before or after, The Times pointed out. And brain images vary from person to person.
These are the kinds of issues that Gazzaniga tackles in his book.
