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To cite this article: Michael C. Corballis (2012): Who's in charge? Free will and the
science of the brain, Laterality: Asymmetries of Body, Brain and Cognition, 17:3,
384-386
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LATERALITY, 2012, 17 (3), 384386
Book Review
Who’s in charge? Free will and the science of the brain, by Michael
S. Gazzaniga, New York, HarperCollins, 2011, 260 pp., $27.99 (hardback),
ISBN 978-0-06-190610-7
Downloaded by [University of Auckland Library] at 14:05 17 May 2012
and philosophy. Gazzaniga’s main concerns here are free will and con-
sciousness, although cerebral asymmetry does feature. He finds the essence
of consciousness in his notion of a left-hemisphere ‘‘interpreter,’’ which
provides conscious accounts of behaviours that are actually elicited
unconsciously. The idea arose from split-brain work in which behaviour
directed by input to the nonverbal right brain is wrongly interpreted by the
left brain, which has no access to the original cause of the action. The more
general idea is that we cannot know the true reasons for our behaviour, but
the interpreter tells a plausible story that forms the basis of consciousness.
The true sources of behaviour lie hidden.
This idea has been around for a while in a different guise. The interpreter
is in essence a confabulator, and confabulation has long been known in a
variety of neurological contexts, as well as in social psychology. At one point
Gazzaniga recognizes the possibility of a right-brain interpreter that works
with spatial inputs, but later in the book this idea seems to be forgotten.
These interpreters are in effect the left and right brains personified.
Personification, though, is one of the blights of ideas about cerebral
asymmetry, and indeed of cognitive science; how often do we resort to
that little person lurking inside, whether in the pineal body, the frontal lobes,
or the left hemisphere? The problem remains as to how to interpret the
interpreters*the notional persons doing the interpreting.
Gazzaniga’s account, though, does suggest that there is no such thing as
free will. Behavior is governed by principles that are essentially mechanical,
buried in the intricacies of neural activity. But such are the intricacies,
further obscured by the fundamental uncertainties at the level of quantum
mechanics, that we will never be able to predict human behaviour with
accuracy, just as we cannot predict the weather with any degree of certainty.
Gazzaniga distinguishes between two levels of analysis*roughly, the neural
and the psychological. With respect to explanations of what people do, often
critical to legal proceedings, we are better to stick to psychological
concepts*perception, memory, motivation, attention, emotion*than to
appeal directly to brain function. ‘‘My brain made me do it’’ should not be
accepted as a legal defence in a court of law. In these respects, the book
386 BOOK REVIEW
interpreter, and the medium of this very book. We still need to know more
about it.
But in the meantime, this book gives us the enjoyable sense of sharing a
dinner conversation with Michael Gazzaniga, holding forth in his inimitable
style.
MICHAEL C. CORBALLIS
Department of Psychology, University of Auckland, Auckland,
New Zealand
m.corballis@auckland.ac.nz