{"id":1377,"date":"2011-11-06T22:27:42","date_gmt":"2011-11-07T04:27:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/waiting.com\/blog\/?p=1377"},"modified":"2011-11-06T22:27:42","modified_gmt":"2011-11-07T04:27:42","slug":"top-brain-researcher-authors-book-on-free-will-and-the-science-of-the-brain","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/waiting.com\/blog\/2011\/11\/top-brain-researcher-authors-book-on-free-will-and-the-science-of-the-brain.html","title":{"rendered":"Top Brain Researcher Authors Book On ‘Free Will And The Science Of The Brain’"},"content":{"rendered":"\r\n

Dr. Michael Gazzaniga is credited with being one of the researchers to discover, through a series of studies, that the brain’s functions\u00a0are divided between its right and left hemispheres.<\/p>\r\n

Gazzaniga has a new book, “Who’s In Charge? Free Will and the Science of the Brain” that comes out this month.\u00a0And timed to its\u00a0publication, 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\u00a0headline “Decoding the Brain’s Cacophony.”\u00a0<\/p>\r\n

http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2011\/11\/01\/science\/telling-the-story-of-the-brains-cacophony-of-competing-voices.html?scp=1&sq=michael%20gazzaniga&st=cse<\/a><\/p>\r\n

Now a professor of psychology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, Gazzaniga is raising questions\u00a0about neuroscience and how it its being used in court.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\r\n

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.<\/p>\r\n

\u00a0“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\u00a0actions?”<\/p>\r\n

The article goes into depth about\u00a0the series of studies that Gazzaniga was involved in at a very young age at Caltech. Those experiments indicated that the left\u00a0side of the brain governs\u00a0intellectual, logical\u00a0functions; while the right side was the one that made “visual-spatial” connections.<\/p>\r\n

That was the\u00a0Eureka moment in a day and age when it was widely believed that “specific\u00a0brain functions like memory were widely — and\u00a0uniformly — distributed in the brain, not concentrated in discrete regions,” The Times wrote.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\r\n

Gazzaniga\u00a0became the founding director in 2007 of the John D. and\u00a0 Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation\u2019s Law and Neuroscience Project, which monitors\u00a0applications in the legal system.<\/p>\r\n

“In recent years lawyers have begun to present brain images as evidence, usually to mitigate responsibility for a crime or to\u00a0 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.”<\/p>\r\n

But\u00a0brain images only reflect one tiny moment in a brain’s state, not what what was happening before or after, The Times pointed out.\u00a0And brain\u00a0images vary from person to person.<\/p>\r\n

These are the kinds of issues that Gazzaniga tackles in his book.<\/p>\r\n

\u00a0<\/p>\r\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Dr. Michael Gazzaniga is credited with being one of the researchers to discover, through a series of studies, that the brain’s functions\u00a0are 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.\u00a0And timed to its\u00a0publication, and a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[806,807],"class_list":["post-1377","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-dr-michael-gazzaniga","tag-michael-gazzaniga-and-brain-research"],"yoast_head":"\nTop Brain Researcher Authors Book On 'Free Will And The Science Of The Brain' - Brain Injury Lawyer Blog<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/waiting.com\/blog\/2011\/11\/top-brain-researcher-authors-book-on-free-will-and-the-science-of-the-brain.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Top Brain Researcher Authors Book On 'Free Will And The Science Of The Brain' - Brain Injury Lawyer Blog\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Dr. Michael Gazzaniga is credited with being one of the researchers to discover, through a series of studies, that the brain’s functions\u00a0are divided between its right and left hemispheres. 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