Michael S. Gazzaniga (born December 12, 1939) is an American cognitive neuroscientist who is an emeritus professor of psychology at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

[4] In 1964, he received a Ph.D. in psychobiology from the California Institute of Technology,[5] where he carried out research on human split-brain patients for his doctoral thesis under Roger Sperry.

[6] In his subsequent work he has made important advances in our understanding of which functions are lateralized in the brain and how the left and right cerebral hemispheres communicate with one another.

[12] This led to Cornell University Medical College, where he was appointed Director of the Division of Cognitive Neuroscience and a Professor of Neurology and Psychology from 1977 to 1988.

[20] His latest book is entitled The Consciousness Instinct: Unraveling the Mystery of How the Brain Makes Mind, published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2018.

Later, however, Sperry and his graduate student Ron Myers found that severing the corpus callosum in monkeys did block the transfer of information.

[28] He designed an apparatus that flashed a letter, number or symbol onto a screen to either the right or left visual field while the patient focused on a central point.

[39] This experiment opened the door to years of research by Gazzaniga and colleagues that has revealed that severing the callosum prevents the transfer of perceptual, sensory, motor, gnostic and other types of information between the left and right cerebral hemispheres.