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Writing in a breezy, sometimes exuberant, sometimes personal style, Michael Gazzaniga, in this diminutive but pithy book, gives us a sweeping panorama of what neuroscientists and their cognitive associates have lately been uncovering about the workings of the human mind. It is, I think, the sort of information that Freud would have welcomed at the time he wrote his “Project,” though he would surely have been startled by much of it. While he wrote elsewhere, referring to the unconscious, that “man is not a master in his own house,” he could hardly have dreamed of the variety of ways in which his disturbing pronouncement is being shown—through ingenious experimentation aided by advanced technology—to be true.
Gazzaniga begins with the unvarnished pronouncement that psychology, having failed as a science, is essentially moribund—though, according to him, everybody seems to know this except the psychologists themselves. Their place has, it seems, been taken over (in some instances quite literally) by the “neuroscientists” and “cognitive scientists.” (Yet, exercising just a tad more caution than Gazzaniga, one somehow finds it hard to refrain from invoking Mark Twain's famous phrase on this subject.) The reason given by Gazzaniga for psychology's demise is that, in having virtually ignored the principle of natural selection, it has wandered off course, directing its major efforts toward the issue of what the mind can do rather than that of what it was specifically evolved to do—or, putting the latter in Gazzaniga's terms, “what it (i.e., the mind) is