Neuroscientist Michael Gazzaniga was on WNYC’s The Brian Lehrer show today. He called “the explanatory gap”–between neural physiology and subjective experience–“the scientific question of our time.” The show just finished, but it should go online here shortly.
Gazzaniga is well known for his research on the relationships between the brain’s two-hemispheres–and his work with “split-brain” patients. He has also written a couple of books on questions about free will. You may remember Damasio discussing his work.
It was interesting to hear Gazzaniga say that the right and left brain are so interconnected that it’s false to say as restrictively as we do in usual speech that someone is using their left brain (like someone who is good with language) or right brain (like someone who is good with images), or that someone is left-brained or right-brained. This may seem obvious once he says it, but he points out that people sort of took the idea about specific things being generated from specific spots and ran with it, when that’s not really what is happening… I also found it a powerful statement when he mentioned that free will needs to be taken into account in tandem with and/or as arising from interaction with the social layer of existence.