Tales from Both Sides of the Brain

With a Foreword by Steven Pinker In Tales from Both Sides of the Brain, Michael S. Gazzaniga tells the story of his passionate, entrepreneurial life in science and his decades-long journey to understand how the separate spheres of our brains communicate and miscommunicate their separate agendas. From his time as an ambitious undergraduate at Dartmouth, as a member of its now famed “Animal House” fraternity, and his life as a diligent graduate student in California to the first experiments he conducted in his own lab; from meeting his first split-brain patients and his collaboration with esteemed intellectuals across disciplines, Gazzaniga recounts the trajectory of his discoveries. In his engaging and accessible style, he paints a vivid portrait not only of his discovery of split-brain theory, but also of his comrades-in-arms—the many patients, friends, and family members who have accompanied him on this wild ride of intellectual discovery. “The idea that one skull can house two minds, each with a measure of autonomy, has also given way to the idea that we all have ‘multiple minds’ operating as a ‘confederation;’ according to Gazzaniga. How this system creates a seemingly unified mind . . . remains a compelling question.” —New York Times Book Review “Tales will be cataloged as scientific autobiography. . . . But it is as much a book about gratitude—for the chance to study a subject as endlessly fascinating as the brain, for the author’s brilliant colleagues and . . . for the patients who taught him . . . so much.” —Wall Street Journal “The personal story of a genius famous for one of the rare major discoveries ever made out in the still vast, still baffling terra incognita of the human brain, namely, the split-brain phenomenon.” —Tom Wolfe, author of The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test and The Right Stuff