Michael S. Gazzaniga

Michael S. Gazzaniga

Michael S. Gazzaniga was born on December 12th, 1939 and is currently 86 years old. Michael S. Gazzaniga was born in Los Angeles, California.

Michael S. Gazzaniga is a cognitive neuroscientist and a professor with more than ten books, including Mind Matters and Nature's Mind.
Gazzaniga’s book The Consciousness Instinct is an exploration of the ideas that have been put forward to try to understand what that thing we call consciousness is, and where on earth it is or, more precisely, self-awareness.

That persistent illusion, like time itself, that gives us the feeling of being ourselves and separate from the world outside our brains.

Gazzaniga presents a series of ideas that, while seemingly outside the mainstream of consciousness research, offer a logical perspective and a strong possibility of being correct.

Namely, that the brain is composed of independent modules in a stratified structure, which, working together and simultaneously like a bubbling broth, produce the illusion of a single consciousness. There is a dual nature in living matter, applying Bohr's principle of complementarity to biology, uniting the material aspects with the symbolic aspects that define life.

Concluding that biosemiotics is necessary to understand life. Since its origin and self-replication through the genetic code, proteins, and nucleic acids, life is a semiotic system, with material units that obey the laws of physics, but are guided by symbols that follow their own rules.

"The cell is a true semiotic system because it contains all the essential characteristics of such systems: signs, meanings, and code, all produced by the same encoder." In this context, the process that links the symbolic behavior of the constituents of living matter with their purely physicochemical aspects is called semiotic closure, the explanatory gap that would ultimately be the leap from matter to thought and self-awareness.

Gazzaniga has not embraced the concept of coexisting material and nonmaterial worlds- dualism. He looks instead to balance the idea that matter can be in existence in two different states at once- for example, light being both particles and a wave at the same time. In a way, the book too seems to be in two states at once: technical science and the conceptual framework needed to make sense of the subject. Such a balance results not only in an answer but also in a far deeper understanding of the question.

The final chapters of the book explore the idea of modularity in the brain and propose the idea that consciousness is not centralized but modular. Hence, the consciousness of a module is made present through module activation and deactivation. In some intricate method, the consciousness modules bubble to the surface of our awareness and blend into a continuous sense of self.

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Michael S. Gazzaniga: F.A.Q