Michael Corballis

Michael Charles Corballis (10 September 1936 – 13 November 2021) was a New Zealand and Canadian Paul, also a cognitive neuroscientist, and Tim, a novelist and academic. Barbara Corballis died in 2020.

Education and career Corballis received his high-school education as a boarder at Wanganui Collegiate School. He earned a Master's degree in Mathematics at the University of New Zealand in 1959 and a Master of Arts in psychology at the University of Auckland, New Zealand, in 1962. He then moved to McGill University in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, where he completed a PhD in psychology in 1965.

In 1978, Corballis was appointed professor of psychology at the University of Auckland. From 1993 to 2000, he was also Director of the Research Centre for Cognitive Neuroscience within the department. In 2008, Corballis became emeritus professor. In 2014, he became the university's Inaugural Creativity Fellow.

In July 2021, Corballis and six other University of Auckland professors wrote a controversial letter "In Defence of Science" to the New Zealand Listener magazine, in which they said that Māori knowledge should not be considered in the same category as science because of the former's spiritual content.

Notable students include Jenni Ogden and Faraneh Vargha-Khadem.

Research

During Corballis's years at McGill, the main focus of his research was in cognitive neuroscience, analyzing complex cognitive systems such as perception, attention, and memory, and initiating a research program on cerebral asymmetry. Of great interest was his hypothesis that human language evolved from gestures, expressed in the book From hand to mouth; it received more than 1500 citations in its first year.

Over his career, Corballis published more than 400 scientific papers and book chapters, and 14 books. His work was cited more than 27,000 times, giving him a h-index of 77. Corballis supervised the work of at least 14 research assistants, graduate students, and postdoctoral fellows, who, in turn supervised more than 50 students and fellows, leaving a lasting human scientific legacy.

Service

Corballis served in many roles that supported various academic pursuits.

In 2009, he was president of the International Neuropsychological Society.

Corballis edited the New Zealand Journal of Psychology from 1994 to 1997.

Corballis chaired University of Auckland Review Committees, including the Department of Sociology (1992) and the Department of Engineering Science (2003). He also chaired or was a member of other universities' reviews, including University of Queensland, Victoria University of Wellington, University of Otago, and University of Canterbury. Corballis performed numerous administrative taks for the Royal Society of New Zealand and for the New Zealand Psychological Society. In 1999, Corballlis was awarded the Shorland Medal by the New Zealand Association of Scientists. The same year he was awarded a James Cook Research Fellowship for research into tracking brain activity. In the 2002 Queen's Birthday and Golden Jubilee Honours, he was appointed an Officer of the New Zealand Order of Merit, for services to psychological science. In 2016, he received the Royal Society of New Zealand's Rutherford Medal.

Death

Corballis died in November 2021, after a short period of cancer. Among those who paid tribute to him was the Harvard professor Steven Pinker, who described his "beloved former professor" as having done "brilliant work on handedness, mental rotation," and the evolution of language. He further described Corballis as "urbane, charming, witty, irreverent."

Publications

Books

Psychology of Left and Right with Ivan L. Beal. John Wiley & Sons (1976) The Ambivalent Mind: The Neuropsychology of Left and Right with Ivan L. Beale. Nelson-Hall (1983) Human Laterality, Academic Press (1984) Memory Mechanisms: A Tribute to Graham Goddard with Cliff Abraham and Geoff White (Editors). Lawrence Erlbaum Associates (1991) The Lopsided Ape: Evolution of the Generative Mind. Oxford University Press (1991) The Descent of Mind with S. E. G. Lea (Editors). Oxford University Press (1999) Twin Lateralisation with C. McManus and M. Peters (Editors). Psychology Press (1999) From Hand to Mouth: The Origins of Language. University Press Group (2003) The Recursive Mind: The Origins of Human Language, Thought, and Civilization. Princeton University Press (2011) Pieces of Mind: 21 Short Walks Around the Human Brain. Auckland University Press (2011). Republished as A Very Short Tour of the Mind. The Overlook Press, USA (2013) The Wandering Mind: What the Brain Does When You're Not Looking Auckland University Press (2014) How a Distinguished Scholar was Driven to Kill Herself: The Dark Side of Science. The Edwin Mellen Press (2016) The Truth about Language: What It Is and Where It Came From. University of Chicago Press (2017) Adventures of a Psychologist: Reflections on What Made Up the Mind. Routledge (2020)

Selected journal papers

Corballis, M. C. (2009). "The evolution and genetics of cerebral asymmetry". Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, B: Biological Sciences, 364, 867–879. Lewald, J., Peters, S., Corballis, M. C., & Hausmann, M. (2009). "Perception of stationary and moving sound following cortectomy". Neuropsychologia, 47, 962–971. Milivojevic, B., Hamm, J. P., & Corballis, M. C. (2009). "Functional neuroanatomy of mental rotation". Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 21, 945–959. Corballis, M. C. (2009). "The evolution of language". Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 1156, 19–43. Suddendorf, T., Addis, D. R., & Corballis, M. C. (2009). "Mental time travel and the shaping of the human mind". Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, B: Biological Sciences, 364, 1317–1324.

More classic & recent journal papers

245 citations (Semantic Scholar/DOI) [2022-07-25]. Corballis, Michael C. (1989). Laterality and human evolution. Psychological Review, 96(3), 492–505. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-295X.96.3.492 215 citations (Semantic Scholar/DOI) [2022-07-25]. Corballis, Michael C. (1997). The genetics and evolution of handedness. Psychological Review, 104(4), 714–727. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-295X.104.4.714 173 citations (Semantic Scholar/DOI) [2022-07-25]. Corballis, Michael C. (2014). Left Brain, Right Brain: Facts and Fantasies. PLoS Biology, 12(1). https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.1001767 172 citations (Semantic Scholar/DOI) [2022-07-25]. Corballis, Michael C. (1980). Laterality and myth. American Psychologist, 35(3), 284–295. https://doi.org/10.1037/0003-066X.35.3.284 55 citations (Semantic Scholar/DOI) [2022-07-25]. Corballis, Michael C., Hattie, J., & Fletcher, R. (2008). Handedness and intellectual achievement: An even-handed look. Neuropsychologia, 46(1), 374–378. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2007.09.009 49 citations (Semantic Scholar/DOI) [2022-07-25]. Corballis, M C, & Häberling, I. S. (2015). Complementarity or independence of hemispheric specializations? A brief review. Neuropsychologia, (October 2017). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2015.12.018 26 citations (Semantic Scholar/DOI) [2022-07-25]. Corballis, Michael C. (2015). What's left in language? Beyond the classical model. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences. https://doi.org/10.1111/nyas.12761 4 citations (Semantic Scholar/DOI) [2022-07-25]. Corballis, Michael C. (2021). How Asymmetries Evolved: Hearts, Brains, and Molecules. Symmetry, (6), 914. https://doi.org/10.3390/sym13060914