Tales from Both Sides of the Brain: A Life in Neuroscience

Michael S. Gazzaniga, "the father of cognitive neuroscience," gives us an exciting behind-the-scenes look at his seminal work on the enigmatic coupling of the right and left brain

In the mid-twentieth century, Michael S. Gazzaniga made one of the great discoveries in the history of neuroscience: split-brain theory, the notion that the right and left hemispheres of the brain can act independently from each other and have different strengths.

In Tales from Both Sides of the Brain, Gazzaniga tells the story of his passionate, entrepreneurial life in science and his decades-long journey to understand how the separate spheres of our brains communicate and miscommunicate their separate agendas. From his time as an ambitious undergraduate at Dartmouth, as a member of its now famed "Animal House" fraternity, and his life as a diligent graduate student in California to the first experiments he conducted in his own lab; from meeting his first split-brain patients to his collaboration with esteemed intellectuals across disciplines, Gazzaniga recounts the trajectory of his discoveries. In his engaging and accessible style, he paints a vivid portrait not only of his discovery of split-brain theory, but also of his comrades in arms—the many patients, friends, and family members who have accompanied him on this wild ride of intellectual discovery.

By turns humorous and moving, Tales from Both Sides of the Brain uses an extraordinary discovery about the nature of human consciousness to tell an enthralling story of how science gets done.

Michael S. Gazzaniga is internationally recognized in the field of neuroscience and a pio-neer in cognitive research. He is the director of the SAGE Center for the Study of the Mind at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and the author of many popular science books, including Who's in Charge? Free Will and the Science of the Brain; Nature's Mind: The Biological Roots of Thinking, Emotions, Sexuality, Language, and Intelligence; and Mind Matters: How the Mind and Brain Interact to Create Our Conscious Lives. He is a prominent adviser to various institutes involved in brain research, a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and a past president of the American Psychological Society. He is featured regularly on public television and his research has been presented on NBC Nightly News and the Today show. Gazzaniga lives in Vermont and California with his wife and six children.