 Harper Audio presents Tales From Both Sides of the Brain, A Life in Neuroscience by Michael S. Kazanaga, read by Johnny Heller, for the split-brain patients who taught the world so much. Forward, from Steven Pinker, shortly after my arrival at graduate school, I had second thoughts about whether the life of science was for me. I had in the slightest doubt that science was for me. My doubts were about the scientific life. As an undergraduate at McGill University, I did research on auditory perception with Al Bregman, who had tied the research to deep issues in cognition and epistemology. And it was natural that I would proceed to the famed Psychophysics Laboratory at Harvard. But as I was initiated into the lab's culture, I felt the will to live draining out of me. A large, fluorescent-lit room was packed with dusty audio equipment and obsolescing mini-computers, which I was told had to be programmed in assembly language because software packages were for weenies. The lab was inhabited by plaid-clad, pasty-faced ectomorphs, some with wives and children they rarely saw, none with a trace of humor. Their main pastime was sneering at other psychologists' lack of mathematical rigor, although they did have one indulgence gathering around a black-and-white TV on Sunday night to watch MASH over pizza. The lab's first seminar and my introduction to the Dower professors who led it was hardly more encouraging. Let's review the latest work on Delta Eye Over Eye, said one, alluding to Weber's law, the psychophysical function relating discriminable increments in a stimulus's intensity to its absolute intensity. An issue I had thought had been settled a century before and which had inspired William James to write that the study of psychophysics proves that it is impossible to bore a German. Thankfully, I soldiered on because my faith and the value of a scientific life was revived a few years later. When I was a lowly postdoctoral fellow, I was drafted to replace an ailing professor at the last minute and represent the Massachusetts Institute of Technology at a private conference in Santa Barbara, California, at which the icons of psychology, George Miller and Michael Gazzanaga, were to announce their plans for a new field they had christened, cognitive neuroscience. The meeting opened over red wine and antipasto on a fragrant patio with breathtaking views of the aptly named El Encanto Hotel. Gazzanaga's introductory talk was periodically interrupted by wise cracks and laughter from his collaborators, and more often with wise cracks and even hardier laughter from the speaker himself.