>> host: it's so good to be with you, professor michael gazzaniga, today, to talk about your new book, who's in charge, free will and the science of the brain. let me pick up actually right on the title. you have free will in it. it's a little hard to miss and that is a concept that has been around for centuries, millennia actually and it's been a major thorny and controversial debate for so many years so now why is there something new to say about it? >> guest: i think the occasion to think i had something to say about it was to give a series of lectures where you pull together 60 years of brain research. in doing that, one can't help but think of the brain from a mechanistic point of view, how the brain works, how it does its stuff. and there's been, you know, incredible advances in the last 60, 70 years on that topic. and you walk away with the view that, well, this is how the brain works. and then you ask yourself the question, well, given we're kind of understanding how the brain works, where does this concept of free will fit in? i basically comes from the conclusion it's a concept whose time has come to be abandoned. and the reasons why and what to do about it is what the book is all about. so it grows out of the fact that 60 years ago the philosophers writing on this and certainly 100, 1,000 years ago they certainly did not know about how the brain works. >> host: and we're going to get to that in great depth. and you're a neuroscientist. you're not a philosopher. >> guest: right. >> host: but i know you had many years to start to think deeply about these issues during your involvement in a year's long project called the macarthur law of neuroscientist project. can you talk a little bit about that? i believe you were director of it? >> guest: the macarthur foundation launched a project -- it went on for about four years, where they were looking -- are there findings in neuroscience that are going to impact the law and the judicial thinking? and so we pulled together a group of neuroscientists of lawyers and philosophers to look at it and we came across any number of great issues. we launched a lot of research and now the project continued -- they whittled it down to a smaller effort but it continues now under the direction of owen jones at vanderbilt but the project continues because there's going to be so much neuroscience that's brought in to the courtroom at some point. what we determined and what i certainly determined on the time of the task is that it's not ready yet. that the neuroscience is premature. i think most lawyers do too. but it's coming. and to not see it would be a big mistake. it's a kind of information -- it's of a nature that we have to start thinking about it now. >> host: you actually had almost a dry run of this book in the gifford lectures that you gave in scotland. say a little bit about that series? >> guest: the gifford lectures -- they were a series of lectures given at the university you have edinboro and they come out of lord gifford's wishes to talk about heavy matters but do not afraid of natural theology and do not be afraid to bring in science basically. so there's been very distinguished people who give these lectures, many physicists, niels bohr and many theologians and so it came time to have a brain guy kind of represent some of these issues and talk about them and it fell to me and it was a great honor. and a lot of work. >> host: yeah, you're following in the great footsteps in psychology talking -- if we call -- if in a way we're talking now about the neuroscience of psychology. >> guest: the father of american -- and a variety of religious experience came out of those lectures. back then you had to give 20 lectures. it's now been reduced to 6. >> host: you gave 6. now i know you're called -- if wholesale james is the father of american psychology you're actually called the father of cognitive neuroscience and i know that story involves a taxi cab but tell us more about that. >> guest: well, the story -- that really has had legs, that story. the story really is -- came out an interaction that george miller, the great psychologist who was at rockefeller university -- george miller -- the relationship we had when i was at cornell medical school and we used to meet regularly. and at that time in the early '80s, late '70s, there was plenty of neuroscience and there was plenty of cognitive science but they didn't really connect. and the intrigate theories and modeling of cognitive science were not in any way shaped by neuroscientific findings. and then as we discussed on many, many, many occasions, you know, there really is a field here called cognitive neuroscience and it was born out of a realization -- and when we started it was mostly -- it came from just studying patience with focal lesions and looking at their incredibly interesting disorders from a cognitive standpoint. >> host: cognitive meaning? >> guest: cognitive meaning a thought processes, memory, of course, perception is always in there, intentional disarray and the like. it was not -- in the first instance, it was not dealing with psychiatric issues. that's changed. it's much more inclusive it probably reflected a little more than the group was pulled together was neurologic in nature, cognitive in nature. if we had somebody more than you it would be called something else. >> host: i want to turn to the brain i was, of course, a lot of the book is about that and also your whole career has been spent studying the brain. and how -- let's talk a bit about how the brain is organized, the elements of functional organization that have relevance for what's really the $64,000 question, this whole enterprise which is responsibility and our thoughts about that. >> guest: so the -- one of the points i tried to build to after showing that the brain really is -- has a lot of structure, a lot of complexity built into its structure, and that the brain comes with a lot of stuff as it were. it has the ability to process information in particular ways. it's not learning everything from boot straps up. these -- the basic neurobiology and the basic psychology came out of a time when people not so long ago, 50, 60 years ago where they thought that. they thought you learned everything. and the brain was just a bowl of mush, mush is not true. and we learned there's specialists in the human brain and they're all over the place and they're interconnected and so you really have a cacophony of processes going on at all times, carrying out the business of the brain, of making decisions, of existing just like you and me. and fully appreciating that, the nature of that, and that these things are going on in different time courses and all the rest of it, just makes it almost silly to think that there's a thing in there calling the shots. this thing runs in a particular way. we as humans always look for an essentialism, well, that thing must have something in there just like a person -- you remember the movie men in black, yeah, a little guy in there is pulling the thing. that's not just the way it works. and so is getting to that point then in the book and going through the experiments over the years that have shown that, then you get to the question, well, what does -- what is this free will thing all about? >> host: and you speak a lot about automatic brains. >> guest: right. >> host: pardon me. and you talk about your research on split brains. can you speak a bit about that now? >> guest: sure, these were patients that were operated on -- starting almost 50 years ago today. and these were patients who had epilepsy and the idea in disconnecting their hemispheres was to have patients who might have a seizure but the seizure would be located to one-half brain, keeping the other seizure free. and then the patients would not go into a generalized convulsion. so that was the medical side of the story. and what i did with roger sperry starting in 1961 is we measured the cognitive and per -- and shown their different hemispheres and began to examine of how some things did interact against the brains even though they were cut but most things didn't and so forth. and out of this came the notion again emphasizing the moduleler -- lateral specialization of the brain, so it added a lot to the story which had already started through classic neurology and neuropsychology, of course. >> host: can you tell the story about the chicken and the shovel? >> guest: yes. one of the things we discovered years later -- this is all in asking a question, i might say. so when we first started split brain work was -- >> host: for epilepsy treatment. >> guest: for epilepsy and we would show pictures to somebody on screen. and if you fixate a point on the screen, show pictures to the left or to the right, what people normally do is name everything to the right of where they're looking 'cause that goes to your left speech center, and they would also -- you and i would name stuff to the left because that would go to your right hemisphere, cross over through this fiber system. well, in split brain patients what we first discovered was that information presented here was normally a name just like you would expect because it goes to patient's left dominate speaking hemisphere but information over here simply went unremarked. well, what's that? then we discovered that by letting the left hand point to objects that might relate to this picture, the right hemisphere was just fine. it just couldn't talk. so that was the basic split brain phenomenon. so 25 years later, my student and i, you know, changed the question so we showed two pictures. instead of what did you see, where they would always just say -- we would let them respond to choices of pictures in front of them and so the patient in each hemisphere would respond, each hand would respond. and then we'd say to the patient, well, did you do that? and they would immediately tell you why they -- it's a picture of a chicken club and given their left brain and one of the examples was a chicken, they said well, a chicken claw goes with a chicken but now they have this left hand pointing to a shovel 'cause that's the best picture for a snow scene the right hemisphere would see and they look at this left hand and you would need a shovel to clean out the chicken shed and that made coherence of the story going on in the left hemisphere so there's a notion that there's a special thing in the right brain called the interpreter and it's interpreting all the behaviors that pour out of all these modules and keeping a unified story narrative including our own emotions, our change in emotions, so forth and so on. >> host: and that's just one aspect of a big story of how humans are such meaning-making creatures. can i ask you to give just more illustration to that because it's so powerful and it's actually of an experiment that i read, was the first thing i read in psychology 101. >> guest: yes. there the experiments were by -- you'd have a cognitive state, someone would be in a particular cognitive state and then you would vary the degree of arousal that the person would be under. by manipulate the cognitive state they would interpret the arousal and if the cognitive state was of a negative state they would manipulate the arousal another way. so the cognitive state was important to give color to the underlying arosal and we did a variation of that experiment on the patients. we would -- we would make the right hemisphere laugh and the left hemisphere really didn't know why the right hemisphere was laughing but then it cooked up a reason, a happy reason why it was laughing. and if it was a sad picture, the opposite. >> host: well, they were much more intrusive. they gave people -- didn't they give them injections epinephrine to get them all nervous and the two settings -- >> guest: yeah. >> host: one setting was a -- sort of a disturbing setting with someone who was upset. another one was a happy one and they -- as you say they interpreted their internal states depending on the context. >> guest: yes. right. >> host: so here's what would seem like a challenging question that i know you haven't already answered to it which is if there's automaticity about comingtician how are you sitting here and you're carefully thinking your words and when you wrote the book, you obviously deliberated profoundly in that process, so sometimes when i -- when i read about that automaticity, well, maybe the folks who are not so expert in this area might have an meltdown but yet there's room for deliberation as well as you talk about that in the book. >> guest: well, it comes down to trying to understand how we work. and if you're not curious about that and you want to hold on to the model that there's a little guy in there doing all the work, fine. but that's just not what science does. it starts taking things apart and saying, how does this machine work? and that is -- that is the whole process of cognitive neuroscience and that's what happens. you then think differently about these issues. i don't think it makes -- in terms of the worse issue, though, there's -- i'm just along for the ride kind of argument, you know, that the brain is doing all the heavy stuff. by placing responsibility in the social framework in which we live, the issue is not free will but are you a responsible agent and the answer is a resounding agent, yes, you're a responsible agent because responsibility is in the deal that you construct with your social group. and you have to be -- any network, any social network, full of people or in a computer network, full of people running this thing -- there's got to be accountability. and that's -- and no matter how much more we understand about the brain, you can't get rid of that dimension of all these interactions. >> host: and what's the nature of the debate around that, in terms of -- i'll introduce the word determinism or how some people define it and this notion of responsibility? >> guest: yeah. so determinism, of course, refers simply to the fact that all things have causes and physics at being the first in the line there that because things are -- there are causes for all things that, therefore, that goes right up into the biology and into the cell and into the neurons and, therefore, into thoughts and, therefore, into society and all the rest of it, and the determinus were -- i mean, if you look at the large sweep of history, we've been marching toward a more deterministic view from lucretious to the greeks all the way up to darwin and everybody. einstein, in particular, the king, newton and so forth. we thought there was going to be a break in this when the quantum physics guys came along and said well, there's this indeterminant si in place and time and so forth. and then they realized, you know, but wait a minute, well, you can have a quantum level phenomenon, a quantum level phenomenon are active in billiard balls, for example. and billiard balls fall in newtonian physics and those are very determined and so, therefore, the physicists bailout of being free, of having wiggle room has been put on the side table and we're now back to the fact that we're thinking about the mechanisms that go in to the brain, okay? and those are determinant and oval and, therefore, there's this, oh, no, everything is determinative kind of thing. to the point where richard dawkins as an example has a very strong view on this and says that any scientific understanding dictates that we have this deterministic view and, therefore, when you think of someone engaged in antisocial behavior, there really shouldn't be a punishment for them because he uses this wonderful essay by the way basil's scar, to quit beating basil's scar. your car doesn't work, you don't go beat it. you fix it. and so since we are a version of basil's scar, we're a machine, too, when it doesn't work properly, we shouldn't go beat it -- publish it, we should treat it, fix it. and things go off in that direction. and the arguments get very interesting. my point is where we should say -- you know, let's accept the fact that we have a deterministic situation and let's not let go of the fact, however, that there is a responsibility that is alive and well because of the social grouping and, therefore, we hold everybody responsible for their action, even the bad guys. >> host: uh-huh. >> guest: then the question becomes, i'm sorry for this long-winded answer -- then the question becomes, let's talk -- let's talk about what are we going to do to this bad guy? now what's the question? should we punish them, put their hand in a screw and put them in a solitary confinement and do whatever we do, or should we view them as treatable subjects? let's say we know -- let's say we gain much knowledge about psychopathic behavior and we know what part of their brain is twinkling incorrectly, should we think of a cure so that we can give them drug x or whatever and the twinkles fix themselves and they're no longer psychopathic and they're no longer prone to crime, is that okay? or wait a minute, but shouldn't they be punished for that earlier event, et cetera. those are social decisions. it's a different debate. and they really tickle deep-seated beliefs about the nature of the human condition. trust me. you know that. but that's another debate than, you know, the responsibility of the determinism issue. >> host: right. actually, let's go back to dawkins' essay for a minute because it is very interesting and he as you say, you know, why kick -- you don't kick a car -- excuse me, you don't punish a car. you get it fixed. if you can't fix it i guess it goes to the junk heap. cars don't learn -- and -- but you get in depth as we talk about plasticy, we have plastic brains that learn from environmental events. >> guest: that's true we want to be corrective. they are called correctional institutions. the dirty little word is we're not very good at it. and no matter what the treatment is, the recidivism rate across all brains of trying to fix the system are not particularly good. and so but as i say that is a separate debate in how we can get better at that as -- >> host: well, actually -- true. the rehabilitation is depending on the problem if it's -- if it's a drug offender, then we have wonderful drug courts but that's different than psychopathy. i actually have that mind more deterrence, that a plastic brain can respond to punishment or some sort of adverse response because of the plastic tisity as well >> guest: so we have a model -- that the psychologists of the last 50 years built into our head that humans will react to punishment like rats do. and, therefore, we should use literally the laws of reward and punishment and apply them to humans. that's probably not true. that punishment works differently in humans because it has such a social dimension to it. humiliation is a far greater control on someone's future behavior than is a pinprick or, you know, some receptive response that hurts. so i think there is -- i think -- how to deal with the person who has violated the law, who is now in our custody -- how we deal with them is something that should be very actively examined. i do not -- i leave it as a problem in the book because that is a huge issue and the major research needs a lot about and a place i think our society should think about it. let me give you one metaphor that makes -- got me thinking about it. let's assume our neuroscience becomes so exact on the brain of a wrongdoer. it's not there yet. but let's say it does. we now in our national institutes neural logic disease and stroke have recognized many diseases, parkinson's and many others and we fix them, we try to fix them. and that causes an abnormal behavior. it's within the realm of social accepted behavior but nonetheless it's an abnormal behavior but the model is there and we go to fix it. but now we got this ab