Michael Gazzaniga

Michael Saunders Gazzaniga, born December 12, 1939, is an American cognitive neuroscientist and professor emeritus of psychology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He graduated from Dartmouth College in 1961 with a degree in zoology and received a Ph.D. in psychobiology from the California Institute of Technology in 1964, carrying out his doctoral research on human split-brain patients under Roger Sperry. His later work advanced understanding of the lateralization of brain function and of communication between the left and right cerebral hemispheres, and he formulated the idea of the left hemisphere interpreter while studying split-brain patients in New Hampshire with his graduate student Joseph LeDoux. In 1978 he and George A. Miller gave the field of cognitive neuroscience its name. He founded the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience and helped found the Cognitive Neuroscience Society, held posts at Cornell, Dartmouth and the University of California, Davis, and became founding director of the SAGE Center for the Study of the Mind at UC Santa Barbara, which he directed from 2006 to 2023.