V.S. Ramachandran's Tales Of The 'Tell-Tale Brain'

Dr. V.S. Ramachandran is a neurologist and professor at the University of California, San Diego, who studies the neural mechanisms underlying human behaviors. He has written several books about unlocking the mysteries of the human brain. In his latest, The Tell-Tale Brain, Ramachandran describes several neurological case studies that illustrate how people see, speak, conceive beauty and perceive themselves and their bodies in 3-D space.

Even basic sensory maps in the brain can be remapped in a matter of months, says neurologist V.S. Ramachandran.


Ramachandran suspected that once an arm was amputated, the area in the brain mapped to that arm was deprived of sensory inputs it was used to receiving — and became hungry for new sensations.

http://www.npr.org/2011/02/14/133026897/v-s-ramachandrans-tales-of-the-tell-tale-brain

Excerpt: 'The Tell-Tale Brain' by V.S. Ramachandran

For the past quarter century I have had the marvelous privilege of being able to work in the emerging field of cognitive neuroscience. This book is a distillation of a large chunk of my life's work, which has been to unravel — strand by elusive strand — the mysterious connections between brain, mind, and body. In the chapters ahead I recount my investigations of various aspects of our inner mental life that we are naturally curious about. How do we perceive the world? What is the so-called mind-body connection? What determines your sexual identity? What is consciousness? What goes wrong in autism? How can we account for all of those mysterious faculties that are so quintessentially human, such as art, language, metaphor, creativity, self-awareness, and even religious sensibilities? As a scientist I am driven by an intense curiosity to learn how the brain of an ape — an ape! — managed to evolve such a godlike array of mental -abilities.

By comparison, the sciences of the mind — psychiatry, neurology, psychology — languished for centuries. Indeed, until the last quarter of the twentieth century, rigorous theories of perception, emotion, cognition, and intelligence were nowhere to be found (one notable exception being color vision). For most of the twentieth century, all we had to offer in the way of explaining human behavior was two theoretical edifices—Freudianism and behaviorism — both of which would be dramatically eclipsed in the 1980s and 1990s, when neuroscience finally managed to advance beyond the Bronze Age. In historical terms that isn't a very long time. Compared with physics and chemistry, neuroscience is still a young upstart. But progress is progress, and what a period of progress it has been! From genes to cells to circuits to cognition, the depth and breadth of today's neuroscience—however far short of an eventual Grand Unified Theory it may be—is light-years beyond where it was when I started working in the field. In the last decade we have even seen neuroscience becoming self-confident enough to start offering ideas to disciplines that have traditionally been claimed by the humanities. So we now for instance have neuroeconomics, neuromarketing, neuroarchitecture, neuroarcheology, neurolaw, neuropolitics, neuroesthetics (see Chapters 4 and 8), and even neurotheology. Some of these are just neurohype, but on the whole they are making real and much-needed contributions to many fields.

Transcript