Michael Gazzaniga PhD

Michael Gazzaniga is Director of the SAGE Center for the Study of the Mind at UCSB. He is the president of the Cognitive Neuroscience Institute, the founding director of the MacArthur Foundation's Law and Neuroscience Project and the Summer Institute in Cognitive Neuroscience, and a member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, the Institute of Medicine, and the National Academy of Sciences. He received a Ph.D. in Psychobiology from the California Institute of Technology, where he worked under the guidance of Roger Sperry, with primary responsibility for initiating human split-brain research. He subsequently made remarkable advances in our understanding of functional lateralization in the brain and how the cerebral hemispheres communicate with one another. He has published many books accessible to a lay audience which, along with his participation in the public television series The Brain and The Mind, have been instrumental in making information about brain function generally accessible. This accessibility has been essential in obtaining public support for clinical and basic science research. Professor Gazzaniga’s newest book, Tales from Both Sides of the Brain: A Life in Neuroscience (Ecco/Harper Collins, 2015), recounts his decades-long journey to understand how the separate spheres of our brains communicate and miscommunicate with their separate agendas.

His publications are as follows:
Gazzaniga, M. S. (2015). Tales from both sides of the brain: A life in neuroscience. New York, NY: Ecco/HarperCollins.
Gazzaniga, M. S., & Mangun, G. R. (Eds.). (2014). The cognitive neurosciences (5th ed.). Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
Gazzaniga, M. (2012). Who's in charge? Free will and the science of the brain. New York, NY: Ecco/HarperCollins.
Bassett, D. S., & Gazzaniga, M. S. (2011). Understanding complexity in the human brain. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 15(5), 200-209.
Putnam, M. C., Steven, M. S., Doron, K. W., Riggall, A. C., & Gazzaniga, M. S. (2010). Cortical projection topography of the human splenium: hemispheric asymmetry and individual differences. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 22(8), 1662-1669.
Gazzaniga, M. S. (2009). Human: The science of what makes us unique. New York, NY: Ecco/HarperCollins.
Gazzaniga, M. S. (2005). The ethical brain: The science of our moral dilemmas. New York, NY: Dana Press.
Gazzaniga, M. S. (2000). Cerebral specialization and interhemispheric communication: Does the corpus callosum enable the human condition? Brain, 123(7), 1293-1326.
Greely, H., Sahakian, B., Harris, J., Kessler, R. C., Gazzaniga, M., Campbell, P., & Farah, M. J. (2008). Towards responsible use of cognitive-enhancing drugs by the healthy. Nature, 456(7223), 702-705.