Scott Turow + Michael Gazzaniga

One of the country’s top legal thriller writers meets with one of the world’s top cognitive neuroscientists to explore how justice and retribution are processed in the brain.
“To die, to sleep;
To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there’s the rub.
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause.”
– William Shakespeare, Hamlet
Michael Gazzaniga is the Director of the Sage Center for the study of Mind at the University of California, Santa Barbara. In 1964 he received a PhD from the California Institute of Technology, where he worked under the guidance of Roger Sperry, with primary responsibility for initiating human split-brain research. In his subsequent work he has made important advances in our understanding of functional lateralization in the brain and how the cerebral hemispheres communicate with one another. He has published many books accessible to a lay audience, such as The Social Brain, Mind Matters, and Nature’s Mind. These along with his participation in several public television specials have been instrumental in making information about brain function generally accessible to the public. He is the founder of the Cognitive Neuroscience Institute and the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, of which he is the Editor-in-Chief Emeritus. Gazzaniga is a member of the President’s Council on Bioethics and of the American Academy of Arts and Science and the Institute of Medicine. His new book is HUMAN and is published by Harper Collins.
Scott Turowis a writer and attorney. He is the author of nine best-selling works of fiction, including his first novel, Presumed Innocent (1987), and the sequel, Innocent, published in May last year. He has also written two nonfiction books about his experiences in the law. Turow has been a partner in the Chicago office of SNR Denton (formerly Sonnenschein, Nath & Rosenthal), an international law firm, since 1986, concentrating on white collar criminal defense while also devoting a substantial part of his time to pro bono matters. He has served on a number of public bodies, including the Illinois Commission on Capital Punishment to recommend reforms to Illinois’ death penalty system, and was the first Chair of Illinois’s Executive Ethics Commission which was created in 2004 to regulate executive branch employees in the Illinois State government. He is President of the Authors Guild, the nation’s largest membership organization of professional writers, and is currently a Trustee of Amherst College.