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This is a small and quite readable book by one of the great figures in cognitive neuroscience. Michael Gazzaniga has published hundreds of scientific articles and numerous books, textbooks, and edited scholarly works. He is famous for his seminal research on commisurized (split-brain) patients. The lofty expectations with which I turned the first page of this, his most recent book, no doubt contributed to my disappointment as I turned the last.
The Mind's Past is meant for the educated lay reader. The title captures Gazzaniga's central thesis: that a core function of mind is to construct an illusory past in which we feel that we know what we are doing as we do it, and where actions seem to flow from our conscious will. The mind's past is different from the brain's past, in that the latter has done its work before “you” know it. The self is a “spin doctor.” The fictions of the self and the self as fiction are a central concern for psychoanalysts. A discussion of the neurologic foundations of such fictions would be interesting to many of us.
Gazzaniga situates himself on one side of a fundamental debate about how the brain is constructed, how it develops, and how it functions. Unfortunately, he does not spell out or elaborate both sides of the debate. I was left wanting a more balanced and detailed exposition of these contrasting perspectives.
Gazzaniga's first premise is that the brain is a collection of specialized systems, and that “brains accrue specialized systems through natural selection.” He contrasts his position with his understanding of connectionism, as represented by Sejnowski of the La Jolla group, who sees the brain as an all-purpose learning device that transforms itself as the result of experience in the world, and who eschews domain specific propositions. Gazzaniga's opponent here is a more extreme representative of those who emphasize the selforganizing properties of the brain as a complex, open dynamical system whose development and organization is in