Top 17 Quotes & Sayings by Roger Wolcott Sperry

What it comes down to is that modern society discriminates against the right hemisphere.

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.

The main theme to emerge... is that there appear to be two modes of thinking, verbal and nonverbal, represented rather separately in left and right hemispheres respectively and that our education system, as well as science in general, tends to neglect the nonverbal form of intellect. What it comes down to is that modern society discriminates against the right hemisphere.

Before brains there was no color or sound in the universe, nor was there any flavor or aroma and probably little sense and no feeling or emotion.

(The mind's) dynamics transcend the time and space of brain physiology.

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.

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.

What is needed to break the vicious spiral is a world-wide change in attitudes, values, and social policy. As Einstein put it, "We need a substantially new manner of thinking if mankind is to survive."

Sperry's thinking about subjective experience, consciousness, the mind, and human values makes a powerful plea for a new scientific examination of ethics in the workings of consciousness. These ideas were crystallized in his paper "The Impact and Promise of the Cognitive Revolution" (1993).

The upward thrust of evolution as part of the design becomes something to preserve and revere.

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. No more critical task can be projected for the 1970s than that of seeking for civilized society a new, elevated set of value guidelines more suited to man's expanded numbers and new powers over nature, a frame of reference for value priorities that will act to secure and conserve our world instead of destroying it.

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.

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.

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.

Futurists and common sense concur that a substantial change, worldwide, in life style and moral guidelines will soon become an absolute necessity.

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.

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.