Michael Gazzaniga

From Psy3241

Michael Gazzaniga is one of the worlds leading neuroscientists. He is a psychology professor at the University of California Santa Barbara and director for the SAGE Center for the Study of Mind. His research focuses on patients that have undergone split-brain surgery and that have revealed lateralization of functions across the cerebral hemispheres. He has made advanced our understanding of functional lateralization in the brain and how the cerebral hemispheres communicate with one another.

History

Gazzaniga was born on December 12, 1939. As a child, he was always fascinated with examining things and even set up his own laboratory in his garage in high school to study the enzymes of rabbit muscle. His father, brothers, and sisters all loved to meddle around with surgical procedures as well. With this interest of his, he received a summer fellowship from Roger W Sperry at Caltech where he studied nerve growth. He later went on to Dartmouth for undergradate school and graduated 1961 and received a Ph.D in psychobiology from the California Institute of Technology in 1964 where he worked under Roger Sperry with primary responsibility for initiating human split-brain research.

Achievements

Director of the Summer Institute in Cognitive Neuroscience President of the Cognitive Neuroscience Institute Member of the President's Council on Bioethics Editor-in-Chief Emeritus of the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience Founded the Cognitive Neuroscience Society Fellow of the Advancement of Science, the American Neurological Association, American Psychological Association, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Awarded a National Institute of Physiology

Publications

The Social Brain Mind Matters Nature's Mind The Cognitive Neurosciences III The Ethical Brain - published in 2005