Roger Wolcott Sperry quotes

Roger Wolcott Sperry was an American neuropsychologist and neurobiologist, renowned for his research on split-brain patients. His groundbreaking experiments demonstrated that the two hemispheres of the brain can function independently. He received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for these contributions. Here are 39 of his quotes:

The new way of thinking, spawned by the cognitive revolution, shows strong promise ... Reversing previous doctrine in science, the new paradigm affirms that the world we live in is driven not solely by mindless physical forces but, more crucially, by subjective human values. Human values become the underlying key to world change. (Roger Wolcott Sperry)
The objective psychologist, hoping to get at the physiological side of behavior, is apt to plunge immediately into neurology trying to correlate brain activity with modes of experience ... The result in many cases only accentuates the gap between the total experience as studied by the psychologist and neural activity as analyzed by the neurologist. View quote
Roger Wolcott Sperry
There probably is no more important quest in all science than the attempt to understand those very particular events in evolution by which brains worked out that special trick that has enabled them to add to the cosmic scheme of things: color, sound, pain, pleasure, and all the other facets of mental experience. View quote
Roger Wolcott Sperry
The grand design of nature perceived broadly in four dimensions, including the forces that move the universe and created man, with special focus on evolution in our own biosphere, is something intrinsically good that it is right to preserve and enhance, and wrong to destroy and degrade. View quote
Roger Wolcott Sperry
The centermost processes of the brain with which consciousness is presumably associated are simply not understood. They are so far beyond our comprehension that no one I know of has been able to imagine their nature. View quote
Roger Wolcott Sperry
To see a promising solution to a dilemma and then just leave it to questionable development at its own pace without trying to aid its implementation would seem a dereliction. View quote
Roger Wolcott Sperry
The upward thrust of evolution as part of the design becomes something to preserve and revere. View quote
Roger Wolcott Sperry
The cells and fibers of the brain must carry some kind of individual identification tags, presumably cytochemical in nature, by which they are distinguished one from another almost, in many regions, to the level of the single neurons. View quote
Roger Wolcott Sperry
Futurists and common sense concur that a substantial change, worldwide, in life-style and moral guidelines will soon become an absolute necessity. View quote
Roger Wolcott Sperry
When the brain is whole, the unified consciousness of the left and right hemispheres adds up to more than the individual properties of the separate hemispheres. View quote
Roger Wolcott Sperry
It is mutual fear and distrust that mostly generate world tensions and these can be traced in no small measure, like other root causes of worsening world conditions, to different people's conflicting and often intolerant, value-belief differences ... Whereas in the past science did little, if anything, to remedy this situation and in some ways made things worse, our reformed "macro-determinist" science that includes consciousness and subjective values ... provides common universal ethical foundations on which all nations could work to build a World Government or at least a World Security System to help control nuclear developments and other global threats that require international collaboration. (Roger Wolcott Sperry)
Earlier contentions that the right hemisphere is not even conscious largely gave way by the mid seventies to an intermediate position conceding that the mute hemisphere may be conscious at some lower elemental levels, but claiming that it lacks the higher, reflective, self-conscious kind of inner awareness that is special to the human mind and is needed, so it is said, to qualify the right conscious system as a "self' or "person". Self awareness in particular is reported, on the basis of mirror tests mainly, to be a predominantly human attribute and is rated by developmental as well as by evolutionary standards to be a highly advanced phase of conscious awareness. View quote
Roger Wolcott Sperry
With few exceptions, the bulk of the collected lesion evidence up through the 1950s into the early '60s converged to support the picture of a leading, more highly evolved and intellectual left hemisphere and a relatively retarded right hemisphere that by contrast, in the typical righthander brain, is not only mute and agraphic but also dyslexic, word-deaf and apraxic, and lacking generally in higher cognitive function. View quote
Roger Wolcott Sperry
Cognitivism bridges the chasm between what the writer C. P. Snow has called the "two cultures" - the widening gap between the world view of the scientist and the humanist. The Caltech philosopher W. T. Jones has called this the crisis of contemporary culture. View quote
Roger Wolcott Sperry
The time has passed when nations should be allowed to do as they individually wish with regard to global matters, each striving solely in its own interests, with the more powerful now able to destroy all humanity and more. For the common good, we need to frame and abide by a higher system of law and justice, designed with less national, more godlike, perspectives for the preservation and welfare of the biosphere as a whole. The problems of setting up and administering an effective, international force of this kind can hardly be more grave, formidable or insoluble than those we encounter on any alternative course. View quote
Roger Wolcott Sperry
Prior to the advent of brain, there was no color and no sound in the universe, nor was there any flavor or aroma and probably rather little sense and no feeling or emotion. View quote
Roger Wolcott Sperry
As a brain researcher, I'd started out simply accepting the strictly objective principles of the behaviorist position. View quote
Roger Wolcott Sperry
We're beginning to learn the hard way that today's global ills are not cured by more and more science and technology. View quote
Roger Wolcott Sperry
It seems important that the social value factor be more generally recognized as a powerful causal agent in its own right and something to be dealt with directly as such. View quote
Roger Wolcott Sperry
Unlike other aspects of cognitive function, emotions have never been readily confinable to one hemisphere. View quote
Roger Wolcott Sperry
One of the more important things to come out of the split-brain work, as an indirect spin-off, is a revised concept of the nature of consciousness and its fundamental relation to brain processing. (Roger Wolcott Sperry)
Any model or description that leaves out conscious forces ... is bound to be sadly incomplete and unsatisfactory. View quote
Roger Wolcott Sperry
The mind-brain issues are intrinsically more compelling. They carry strong humanistic as well as scientific implications. View quote
Roger Wolcott Sperry
What is needed to break the vicious spiral is a world-wide change in attitudes, values, and social policy. View quote
Roger Wolcott Sperry
Science traditionally takes the reductionist approach, saying that the collective properties of molecules, or the fundamental units of whatever system you're talking about, are enough to account for all of the system's activity. But this standard approach leaves out one very important additional factor, and that's the spacing and timing of activity - its pattern or form. View quote
Roger Wolcott Sperry