First Thoughts: Good book that combines science and ethic leaving many questions!
Who's in Charge?: Free Will and the Science of the Brain
Who's in Charge?: Free Will and the Science of the Brain
by Michael S. Gazzaniga
1. Opening Thoughts
2. Table of Contents
3. Further Reviews and Summaries
4. Quotes from the Book
Opening Thoughts
There is no lack in the number of books being published about the brain, neuroscience, advances in psychology and learning. But each writer has to come up with their own particular spin of what is happening. Gazzaniga is no different. His particular look is from the vantage point of determinism versus free choice. Unlike some authors, Gazzaniga has a long history and corresponding record as a researcher and writer. This is personal for him. His concern is that we take neuroscience beyond its legitimate boundaries to begin setting social agendas. If you have no interest in reading scientific discussions about the brain this may not be the book for you. But if you are interested in where science is headed and some issues that need to be addresses get this book.
Table of Contents
1. The Evolution of the Human
Brain
2. An Overview of Modern
Neuroscience
3. The Neuroscience of Behavior
4. The Neuroscience of
Consciousness
5. The Neuroscience of Our Inner
Voice
6. The Neuroscience of Free Will
7. The Principle of Emergence
8. Social Interaction and the
Emergence of Freedom and Responsibility
9. Determinism Strikes Back
10. Rescuing Accountability from
the Determinist Trap
Further Reviews and Summaries
Short Review in the New Yorker
Quotes from the Book
Other People’s Highlights
From Amazon Book Site
We are personally responsible agents and are to be held
accountable for our actions, even though we live in a determined universe.
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I will maintain that the mind, which is somehow generated by the
physical processes of the brain, constrains the brain. Just as political norms
of governance emerge from the individuals who give rise to them and ultimately
control them, the emergent mind constrains our brains.
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Something like the big bang happened when mind emerged from the
brain. Just as traffic emerges from cars, traffic does ultimately constrain
cars, so doesn’t the mind constrain the brain that generated it?
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Does the mind constrain the brain, or does the brain do
everything from the bottom up? It’s tricky, because in nothing that follows
here am I suggesting the mind is completely independent from the brain. It is
not.
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In 1948, at my alma mater, Dartmouth College, two of Canada’s
and America’s great psychologists, Karl Lashley and Donald Hebb, came together
to discuss the following question: Is the brain a blank slate and largely what
we call today “plastic,” or does the brain come with constraints and is it
somewhat determined by its structure? At the time, the blank slate theory had
reigned for the previous twenty years or so, and Lashley had been one of its
early proponents.Read more at location 187
In his model for neuron growth, neurons grow out to find their
connection in the brain by sending out little filopodia (slender cytoplasmic
projections from the cell) to see which way to go—testing the waters so to
speak—and because of a chemical gradient, they would find their way to a
specific place.Read more at location 268
The current view of the brain is that its large-scale plan is
genetic, but specific connections at the local level are activity-dependent and
a function of epigenetic factors and experience: Both nature and nurture are important,
as any observant parent or pet owner can report.
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Invention and imitation are ubiquitous in the human world, but
are shockingly rare among our animal friends.
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Modern neuroanatomists are quick to point out that as you climb
the primate scale to humans, it is not that additional skills are simply being
added on as once was hypothesized,** but the whole brain is getting rearranged
throughout.
The human brain has on average 86 billion neurons, but 69
billion of them are located in the cerebellum, that small structure at the back
of the brain that helps refine motor control. The entire cortex, the area that
we think is responsible for human thought and culture, has only 17 billion, and
the rest of the brain has a little less than one billion. The frontal lobes and
prefrontal cortex—the part of the human brain that is involved with memory and
planning, cognitive flexibility, abstract thinking, initiating appropriate
behavior and inhibiting inappropriate behavior, learning rules, and picking out
relevant information perceived through the senses—have vastly fewer neurons
than the number in the visual areas, the other sensory areas, and the motor
areas of the cortex. What is larger in the frontal lobes than the rest of the
brain, however, is the arborization of the neurons, that branching of the
dendritic tips of the neurons with the resulting possibility of increased
connections. Read more at location 520
Small local circuits, made of an interconnected group of
neurons, are created to perform specific processing jobs and become automatic.
The result of their processing is passed on to another part of the brain, but
all the computations that were used to arrive at the result are not. So as we
discussed with the visualRead more at location 540
as brain size has increased, the size of the evolutionarily
youngest part of the brain, the neocortex, has increased disproportionately.
The six-layered neocortex is made up of neuronal cells, Monsieur Poirot’s
“little gray cells,” and sits like a large, wrinkled napkin on top of the
cerebral cortex. The neocortex is responsible for sensory perception,
generation of motor commands, spatial reasoning, conscious and abstract
thought, language, and imagination. This increase in size is regulated by the
timing of neurogenesis, which of course is under control of DNA.Read more at location 554
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But now, there is a heretical view that has been coming on in
the last ten years: All neurons are not alike, and some types of neurons may be
found only in specific species. Moreover, a given type of neuron may exhibit
unique properties in a given species.Read more at location 612
So here we are, born with this wildly developing brain under
tremendous genetic control, with refinements being made by epigenetic factors
(nongenetic factors that cause the organism’s genes to behave differently) and
activity-dependent learning. It is a brain with structured, not random,
complexity, with automatic processing, with a particular skill set with
constraints, and with a generalized capacity that has all evolved through
natural selection.Read more at location 671
From this brain comes our personal narrative, not from some
outside mental forces compelling the brain.Read more at location 676
They determined that the adult male human brain contains on
average 86 billion neurons and 85 billion nonneuronal cells and while the
cerebral cortex is 82 percent of the brain’s mass, it possesses only 19 percent
of the brain’s neurons. The majority of the neurons, 72 percent, were found in
the cerebellum, which makes up 10 percent of the mass of the brain.Read more at location 699
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You are certainly not the boss of the brain. Have you ever
succeeded in telling your brain to shut up already and go to sleep? Read more at location 722
Galton was the first to use the term nature versus nurture and
to do studies on twins to tease out the varying influences.†Read more at location 785
we have moved toward the idea of a plethora of systems, some
within a hemisphere and some distributed across hemispheres. We no longer think
of the brain as being organized into two conscious systems at all but into
multiple dynamic mental systems.Read more at location 1002
Our decentralization was the outcome of having a large brain and
the neuroeconomies which allowed it to function: less dense connections forced
the brain to specialize, create local circuits, and automate. The end result is
thousands of modules, each doing their own thing. Our conscious awareness is
the mere tip of the iceberg of nonconscious processing. Below our level of
awareness is the very busy nonconscious brain hard at work. Not hard for us to
imagine are the housekeeping jobs the brain constantly juggles to keep
homeostatic mechanisms up and running, such as our heart beating, our lungs
breathing, and our temperature just right. Less easy to imagine, but being
discovered left and right over the past fifty years, are the myriads of
nonconscious processes smoothly putt-putting along. Think about it. To begin
with there are all the automatic visual and other sensory processing we have
talked about. In addition, our minds are always being unconsciously biased by
positive and negative priming processes, and influenced by category
identification processes. In our social world, coalitionary bonding processes,
cheater detection processes, and even moral judgment processes (to name only a
few) are cranking away below our conscious mechanisms. With increasingly
sophisticated testing methods, the number and diversity of identified processes
is only going to multiply.Read more at location 1112
the brain is not an all-purpose computing device, but a device
made up of an enormous number of serially wired specialty circuits, all running
in parallel and distributed across the brain to make those better decisions.27
This network allows all sorts of simultaneous nonconscious processing to go
on28 and is what enables Read more at location 1125
All these modules are not reporting to a department head, it is
a free-for-all, self-organizing system.Read more at location 1133
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A complex system is composed of many different systems that
interact and produce emergent properties that are greater than the sum of their
parts and cannot be reduced to the properties of the constituent parts. Read more at location 1148
Ironically for psychology in its quest to fully understand
behavior, the signature phenomenon of a complex system “is the multiplicity of
possible outcomes, endowing it with the capacity to choose, to explore and to
adapt.”29 Read more at location 1159
“The common characteristic of all complex systems is that they
display organization without any external organizing principle being
applied.”30 That means no head honcho, no homunculus.
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“The common characteristic of all complex systems is that they
display organization without any external organizing principle being
applied.”30Read more at location 1164
We have discovered something in the left brain, another module
that takes all the input into the brain and builds the narrative. We call this
the interpreter module,Read more at location 1180
As a person is walking, the sensory inputs from the visual and
auditory systems go to the thalamus, a type of relay station. Then the impulses
are sent to the processing areas in the cortex and then relayed to the frontal
cortex.Read more at location 1213
The brain takes a nonconscious shortcut through the amygdala,
which sits under the thalamus and keeps track of everything streaming through.
If a pattern associated with danger in the past is recognized by the amygdala,
it sends an impulse along a direct connection to the brain stem, which then
activates the flight-or-fight response and rings the alarm.Read more at location 1221
The reason I would have confabulated is that our human brains
are driven to infer causality. They are driven to explain events that make
sense out of the scattered facts.Read more at location 1232
When we set out to explain our actions, they are all post hoc
explanations using post hoc observations with no access to nonconscious
processing. Not only that, our left brain fudges things a bit to fit into a
makes-sense story. It is only when the stories stray too far from the facts
that the right brain pulls the reins in. These explanations are all based on
what makes it into our consciousness, but the reality is the actions and the
feelings happen before we are consciously aware of them—and most of them are
the results of nonconscious processes, which will never make it into the
explanations. TheRead more at location 1235
The reality is, listening to people’s explanations of their
actions is interesting—and in the case of politicians, entertaining—but often a
waste of time.
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Once you put consciousness in the loop, your conscious self-monitoring
of the speed takes longer, because consciousness works at a slower base speed.
ThisRead more at location 1246
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“Choking” happens when consciousness steps into the play and
throws the timing off.Read more at location 1252
Thus, the systems built into our brains carry out their jobs
automatically when presented with stimuli within their domain, often without
our conscious knowledge.Read more at location 1286
We have concluded that the neural processes responsible for
searching for patterns in events are housed in the left hemisphere. It is the
left hemisphere that engages in the human tendency to find order in chaos, that
tries to fit everything into a story and put it into a context. It seems thatRead more at location 1346
Once we understand that the left-brain interpreter process is
driven to seek explanations or causes for events, we can see it at work in all
sorts of situations. In fact, it can explain the observations of many past
experiments.Read more at location 1354
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This is what our brain does all day long. It takes input from
other areas of our brain and from the environment and synthesizes it into a
story. ItRead more at location 1400
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to prove that emotional states are determined by a combination
of physiological arousal and cognitive factors.Read more at location 1407
Once again this finding illustrates the human tendency to
generate explanations for events. When aroused, we are driven to explain why.Read more at location 1415
So this left-brain interpretive process that we have takes all
the input, puts it together in a makes-sense story, and out it comes. As we
have seen, however, the left hemisphere’s explanations are only as good as the
information it receives. And in many of the above examples we have seen that
the information it received was faulty.Read more at location 1418
So while we, as neuroscientists, knew that Wolff’s right-brain
pattern perception mechanism is all coded, ran automatically, and was the
source of this capacity, he did not. When he was asked about it, his left-brain
interpreter struggled for an explanation.Read more at location 1496
This concept that the interpreter is only as good as the data it
receives is crucial in explaining many seemingly inexplicable behaviors of both
normal brains and neurological patients. Indeed, if you feed the interpreter
incorrect data you can hijack it.Read more at location 1507
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The emergent conscious state arises out of separate mental
systems, and if they are disconnected or damaged there is no underlying
circuitry from which the emergent property arises.Read more at location 1655
Our subjective awareness arises out of our dominant left
hemisphere’s unrelenting quest to explain these bits and pieces that have
popped into consciousness. Notice that popped is in the past tense.Read more at location 1656
That YOU that you are so proud of is a story woven together by
your interpreter module to account for as much of your behavior as it can
incorporate, and it denies or rationalizes the rest.
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And for the semantic problem, Pattee adds, “[T]he concepts of
causation have completely different meanings in statistical or deterministic
models,” and gives the following example: If you were toRead more at location 1961
Emergence is when micro-level complex systems that are far from
equilibrium (thus allowing for the amplification of random events)
self-organize (creative, self-generated, adaptability-seeking behavior) into
new structures, with new properties that previously did not exist, to form a
new level of organization on the macro level.16Read more at location 1980
Whereas, in strong emergence, the new property is irreducible,
is more than the sum of its parts, and because of the amplification of random
events, the laws cannot be predicted by an underlying fundamental theory or
from an understanding of the laws of another level of organization.Read more at location 1985
the Baldwin effect is a mechanism that explains the evolution of
phenotypic (observable trait) plasticity, the ability which allows an organism
to be flexible in adapting its behavior to changing environments.Read more at location 2436
In essence, the Baldwin effect is the evolution of the ability
to respond optimally to a particular environment. Thus, genes for plasticity
evolve, rather than genes for a particular phenotypic characteristic, although
selection acts upon the phenotype.26Read more at location 2439
The big idea behind the Baldwin effect is that sometimes both
the direction and the rate of evolutionary change by natural selection can be
affected by learned behaviors.Read more at location 2459
which results in your visceromotor system giving you a shot of
adrenaline, thus simulating the emotion), which can either make it to your
attention and be recognized or not. If it does come to your attention, then
your interpreter comes up with a cause for the emotional feeling. YouRead more at location 2569
Was it okay for them to make love? Haidt did a good job
designing this story to stir up all of one’s gut instincts and moral
intuitions. He defines moral intuitions as “the sudden appearance in
consciousness, or at the fringe of consciousness, of an evaluative feeling
(like-dislike, good-bad) about the character or actions of a person, without
any conscious awareness of having gone through steps of search, weighing
evidence, or inferring a conclusion.” Read more at location 2657
Virtues
are what a specific society or culture values as morally good behavior that can
be learned. Different cultures place different values on various aspects of
Haidt’s five modules.Read more at location 2773
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