Roger W. Sperry Quotes & Sayings

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. — 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. — Roger Wolcott Sperry

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

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. — 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. — Roger Wolcott Sperry

Monod proposed an analogy: Just as the biosphere stands above the world of nonliving matter, so an "abstract kingdom" rises above the biosphere. The denizens of this kingdom? Ideas. Ideas have retained some of the properties of organisms. Like them, they tend to perpetuate their structure and to breed; they too can fuse, recombine, segregate their content; indeed they too can evolve, and in this evolution selection must surely play an important role. Ideas have "spreading power," he noted - "infectivity, as it were" - and some more than others. An example of an infectious idea might be a religious ideology that gains sway over a large group of people. The American neurophysiologist Roger Sperry had put forward a similar notion several years earlier, arguing that ideas are "just as real" as the neurons they inhabit. Ideas have power, he said. — James Gleick

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. — 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. — Roger Wolcott Sperry

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. — Roger Wolcott Sperry

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

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

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). — 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. — 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. — 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. — 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. 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. — Roger Wolcott Sperry