ABSTRACT
Michael Saunders Gazzaniga's long experience working with split-brain patients has given him a unique perspective, which had led him to write on some of the wider questions concerning human behaviour, such as moral responsibility, free will and consciousness. When Gazzaniga used a board of lights as a means of presenting visual stimuli, those presented to the left visual field elicited no response, whereas those flashed into the right visual field were correctly reported. Gazzaniga also believes that decision-making, judgement, perception and almost every other cognitive and emotional action in the brain are unconscious – and what we recognise as consciousness arises after in the left hemisphere, through a process which Gazzaniga calls "post-hoc rationalisation". In New York, Gazzaniga managed to access more split-brain patients, although much of his work now focused on the unconscious processing of information in other types of patients.
