For the last 100 years, neuroscience has been in its Dodge City stage: chock full of unruly and unfettered “shoot 'em up” cowboys and outlaws. Why has neuroscience been so unruly? No sheriffs. Unlike many other fields, it has not been disciplined by an agreed-upon set of next questions to be answered. As a result, neuroscience, with its unrestrained and unfettered researchers at large poking about in whatever has interested them, has accumulated information about nervous systems (from insects to humans) at an astonishing rate. As I have related before, so much information is stacking up, however, that if one adopted the intellectual style of first learning all there is to know about a topic before studying new dimensions of it, then future progress would be stopped dead in its tracks, like so many cowboys on the streets of Dodge.

No place was as unfettered and unrestrained as Roger W. Sperry's lab at Caltech. Perhaps the premier brain scientist of the last century, he must have told me a hundred times, “Try it. And don't read the literature until after you have made your observations. Otherwise you can be blinded by pre-existing dogma.” This is how we operated in those delicious free-ranging days in his lab exploring the unknown. If we had an idea, we “tried it.” We were also spurred on by other greats wandering the halls. Linus Pauling (recipient of two Nobel Prizes) once stumbled across me in the midst of an experiment, which resulted in the take-away lesson “Assume nothing.”

As an undergrad, I was interested in neural specificity. In 1960, I lucked out, getting a summer NSF fellowship to study with Sperry, but soon was captivated by all the experiments being done in his lab on “split-brain” animals, primarily cats and monkeys. The results were almost unbelievable: If one side of the brain was trained to do a sensory task, the other side of the brain didn't have a clue about it. I jumped in with both feet, went to work on rabbits, and was hooked.

In cats and monkeys, in order to train one half of the brain only, two things had to be done. First, the optic chiasm was divided down the middle. Thus, information exposed to one eye was only projected to the ipsilateral half brain.