The Mind's Past - Hardcover

Gazzaniga, Michæl S.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0520213203 ISBN 13: 9780520213203

Publisher: University of California Press, 1998

Synopsis

Why does the human brain insist on interpreting the world and constructing a narrative? In this ground-breaking work, Michael S. Gazzaniga, one of the world's foremost cognitive neuroscientists, shows how our mind and brain accomplish the amazing feat of constructing our past—a process clearly fraught with errors of perception, memory, and judgment. By showing that the specific systems built into our brain do their work automatically and largely outside of our conscious awareness, Gazzaniga calls into question our everyday notions of self and reality. The implications of his ideas reach deeply into the nature of perception and memory, the profundity of human instinct, and the ways we construct who we are and how we fit into the world around us.

Over the past thirty years, the mind sciences have developed a picture not only of how our brains are built but also of what they were built to do. The emerging picture is wonderfully clear and pointed, underlining William James's notion that humans have far more instincts than other animals. Every baby is born with circuits that compute information enabling it to function in the physical world. Even what helps us to establish our understanding of social relations may have grown out of perceptual laws delivered to an infant's brain. Indeed, the ability to transmit culture—an act that is only part of the human repertoire—may stem from our many automatic and unique perceptual-motor processes that give rise to mental capacities such as belief and culture.

Gazzaniga explains how the mind interprets data the brain has already processed, making "us" the last to know. He shows how what "we" see is frequently an illusion and not at all what our brain is perceiving. False memories become a part of our experience; autobiography is fiction. In exploring how the brain enables the mind, Gazzaniga points us toward one of the greatest mysteries of human evolution: how we become who we are.

About this title

Review

While we humans point to our big brains and jabber endlessly about how different they make us, other animals seem to remain unimpressed. "Yeah, well, what are they good for?" they'd ask if they could. After all, evolution has been no kinder to us than to them--all of us have had the same amount of time to get where we are, and all of us do just fine eating and reproducing. Are our brains really more valuable to us than teeth to a shark or wings to a bird? This evolutionary view of consciousness could be the key to a better understanding of how we think, and neuroscientist Michael S. Gazzaniga has been helping develop this outlook while working on the frontlines of research. From studies with split-brain patients in the 1960s to the latest tricks of molecular biology today, Gazzaniga shares with us the results of this research and how they are changing the way we think about thinking.

The title of The Mind's Past refers both to the brain's evolution and its construction of personal identity and memory, which offer clues to the puzzle of consciousness. Gazzaniga's refreshingly straightforward, informal prose asks what our brains are good for and shows that some of our most powerful achievements (like language and statistics) might best be thought of as byproducts of systems designed to help us survive and reproduce. The surprising assertion that most of what we believe to be conscious and willful happens before we are aware of it is made plausible and perhaps comforting in this short, very humanistic book. By careful study and reflection on the mind's past, we might be able to learn something of its future. --Rob Lightner

From the Inside Flap

"Gazzaniga, a pioneer in the study of brain-mind relations, provides a highly readable account of what our rapidly accumulating knowledge of the brain implies for the mental processes we live by. The result is a book of enormous interest, written with the broadest possible audience in mind."—George A. Miller, Professor Emeritus Princeton University

"While psychologists, philosophers, and neurologists grapple inconclusively with the elusive concept of consciousness, Gazzaniga convincingly places the 'self' in an evolutionary context. . . . Integrating natural selection, brain function, and mind function, Gazzaniga crystallizes and clarifies, sweeping away the confusing rhetoric with a clear account of how we came to be human."—Ira B. Black, M.D., Robert Wood Johnson Medical School

"A lucid and entertaining book about the mysteries of the human mind. . . . It is the story of how the mind is an evolutionary object just like the beak of a seagull or the wings of a butterfly. Gazzaniga's thesis is that we will not understand the human mind until we grasp this fundamental truth. It is sure to provoke and enlighten. A thoroughly enjoyable, accessible, witty book."—Alfonso Caramazza, Harvard University

"A guided tour through the fascinating personalities whose research findings constitute modern cognitive neuroscience."—Michael I. Posner, University of Oregon

"This book is about how our experience is a construction of the apparatus of our brain. This is great stuff. The material is fascinating, easy to read, witty, and wise."—Steven Pinker, editor of How the Mind Works

About this edition

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 0520213203
• ISBN 13: 9780520213203
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 216