The American Scholar

Split Decisions

THE CONSCIOUSNESS INSTINCT: Unraveling the Mystery of How the Brain Makes the Mind

BY MICHAEL S. GAZZANIGA

Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 288 pp., $28

IN HIS ENGAGING and wide-ranging new book, The Consciousness Instinct, neuroscientist Michael S. Gazzaniga explores a conundrum that has long baffled scientists: “Gazillions of electrical, chemical, and hormonal processes occur in our brain every moment, yet we experience everything as a smoothly running unified whole,” he writes. “What is the organization of our brain that generates conscious unity?”

Gazzaniga, director of the SAGE Center for the Study of the Mind at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and the author of numerous books on the brain, leads us through three possible approaches to answering this question. The first, and the one to which he devotes the most

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