The third in a series of Gifford Lectures by Professor Michael Gazzaniga. Recorded 15 October, 2009 at the Playfair Library Hall, the University of Edinburgh.
The interpreter is the device we humans enjoy that provides us with the capacity to see the meanings behind patterns of our emotions, behavior and thoughts.
This concept is central to understanding the relationship between our brain and our strong sense of self.
In a way, it is the device that liberates us from our automatic ways spelled out in Lecture 1 and 2.
The interpreter constructs the sense that there is a me arising out of the ongoing neuronal chatter in the brain and making all of lifes moment-to-moment decisions.
Our compelling sense of being a unified self armed with volition, deployable attention and self-control is the handiwork of the interpreter, for it brings coherence to a brain that is actually a vastly parallel and distributed system.
This view stands in contrast to much neuroscientific theorizing or existential musing about our unified, coherent nature.
In most models of brain and cognitive mechanism, one can identify, as Marvin Minsky once said, the box that makes all the decisions.
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