Michael Gazzaniga - The Distributed Networks of Mind (Lecture 2)

Gifford Lectures (audio)

The second in a series of Gifford Lectures by Professor Michael Gazzaniga. Recorded 13 October, 2009 at the Playfair Library Hall, the University of Edinburgh. Our brains are organised in such a fashion that very little of the processing, which is to say neural work, goes on in our conscious minds. Any simple act, such as pointing to your nose, involves forming the desire to touch your nose, planning a motor response, gathering information about the location of your nose, calculating in a flash if you want to bring attention to your nose and so on. All that information is gathered and processed and leads to the desired action, and yet little or none of it is done consciously. Even more daunting is the fact that how the brain accomplishes such a simple task is utterly beyond scientific understanding at this point in time. While textbooks are full of knowledge about the specific neurons involved - the areas in the brain that are active during such specific actions and even areas known to be active with intention to act - no one knows how it actually works.