From the Bookshelf of Science and Inquiry…

The Tell-Tale Brain: A Neuroscientist's Quest for What Makes Us Human

V.S. Ramachandran

Start date: January 1, 2013

Finish date: January 31, 2013

Discussion: Book Club 2013

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Book Club 2013

December 2013: "The Strangest Man"
By David · 22 posts · 150 views

last updated Jan 03, 2016 10:51AM

June 2013 - Cosmos
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Dec 30, 2019 Petra X rated it it was amazing

Shelves: reviewed, medicine-science, 2019-100-reviews, 2019-read, psycho-neurology-crime

Ramachandran is as wonderful a writer as he is a brilliant scientist which easy reading of not always simple science. In his book, Phantoms In The Brain: Human Nature And The Architecture Of The Mind, neurologist Ramachandran was more concerned with how the physical brain and what goes wrong with it affects the mind. A very similar field to Oliver Sacks. (They really differ in that Sacks thought of all his patients as people who had an often very interesting disorder. Ramachandran thinks of them Ramachandran is as wonderful a writer as he is a brilliant scientist which easy reading of not always simple science. In his book, Phantoms In The Brain: Human Nature And The Architecture Of The Mind, neurologist Ramachandran was more concerned with how the physical brain and what goes wrong with it affects the mind. A very similar field to Oliver Sacks. (They really differ in that Sacks thought of all his patients as people who had an often very interesting disorder. Ramachandran thinks of them as patients!) In this book, he is concerned with how disorders of the person that originate in the brain are related to the physical brain, to the structures of it and how it works.

In both books, everything is illustrated with examples of people and their behavioural problems with roots in neurology not psychology. Sometimes the author uses them as a jumping-off point for a lecture on the brain, neurons, the very important but hitherto unknown by me, mirror neurons, our senses and various structures of the brain.

One of the most interesting to me because I have experienced it many times in my wonderfully mispent youth (view spoiler) is synesthesia . This is where the senses cross over from the appropriate, like being able to see the colour blue, to the very odd or inappropriate, like also being able to listen to it, feel it, possibly smell it or associate it with a particular number.

I experienced it on LSD, everyone on acid did I think, it was one of the reasons to like it so much. I used to listen to music and then watch it unfold, dance in front of me in wonderful colours and patterns. sometimes ribbons in the sky, sometimes in puffs of warm air I could feel. An orange I peeled and ate exploded in my mouth into tiny pinpricks of colours, pure primaries and jewel tones. You never forget it's so extraordinary the sensation of there being an additional sense to the one you expect. These were not hallucinations but sensory experiences.

Sometimes though the synesthesia edged off into hallucinations (even more enjoyable). I remember that once the notes of the music got up and formed two tiny armies and marched across the carpet unfurling flags at each other in perfect time to the beat, changing colours like a chameleon keeping time with the bass guitar line. (I was kneeling by the electric fire saluting, I kid you not, kind of taking the march past of these musical note armies).\

Ultimately, in the book Ramachandran is on a quest for what makes us human and not like the animals, not one step up from the primates but completely different. What is consciousness and self-awareness, the soul if you like, and where does it lie? In what structure of the brain does it reside in us and no other? Is our humanity, our selfhood, not a sum of how we experience the world and think and dream at night about it? Is it really to be found in a physical structure? Ramachandran's book was a quest to find it and it is a good journey he takes us on, but the end is not in sight. ...more

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Jan 22, 2013 David Rubenstein rated it it was amazing

Shelves: science, evolution, biology, medicine

This is a brilliant book by a first-rate scientist. Ramachandran has personally made some amazing discoveries in the field of neuroscience. His writing is lucid, and his enthusiastic, personable style makes this an informative, as well as a very entertaining book.

Ramachandran's approach is to investigate patients who have had varying degrees and types of brain defects or injuries. These patients acquire abilities or handicaps that Ramachandran interprets and analyzes, in the hope of casting ligh ...more

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Apr 12, 2021 bup rated it it was amazing

Shelves: consciousness, favorites, 2021, science

A must-read for anyone interested in what consciousness means, who ponders the ineffable distinction between electrical impulses governing motor function/perception and the experience of being self-aware.

First, his bona fides: he invented cures for phantom pains of missing body parts using mirrors. He also helped proved that synesthesia is a real perception phenomenon, not just a metaphorical association between sensations of different senses. What I love about both of these is that he did them A must-read for anyone interested in what consciousness means, who ponders the ineffable distinction between electrical impulses governing motor function/perception and the experience of being self-aware.

First, his bona fides: he invented cures for phantom pains of missing body parts using mirrors. He also helped proved that synesthesia is a real perception phenomenon, not just a metaphorical association between sensations of different senses. What I love about both of these is that he did them using technology that has been around centuries - mirrors (duh) and sheets of paper filled with numbers or letters that have hidden shapes or pictures if particular letters or shapes seem to be a different color to you. These were waiting for anyone to try them out! (aside - one of the coolest things that should have clued us all in to the fact that synesthesia is real is that there exist people who are color-blind (say, red/green) and who are color/number-letter synesthetes who see colors 'on' letters and numbers that they never see in nature! They experience them as 'Martian' colors.)

In this book, he attacks the problem of how consciousness could arise through experiments like these (not just his, but lots of others too) and knowledge of various diseases involving damage to parts of the brain to suss out a lot. He acknowledges that experiencing qualia (I experience blue - I really see it in my brain) is different from having a buzzer going off when that light frequency is present as an electric eye might.

And he ends with a hypothesis (spoiler! stop reading if you don't want to know).

Self-awareness arose because of mirror-neurons - those neurons that help us have empathy. Those neurons that fire when we see someone raising an arm when just as when we raise an arm. Those neurons that help us take the perspective of another (usually human, not always). At some point, they decided to take the perspective of someone looking at us. Ourselves looking at ourselves. Now, first of all, as acknowledged - it's a hypothesis, not (yet) confirmed by clever experiments (and it's hard to see the experiment that would allow the development of this as an evolutionary advantage, if not of simply the existence of this causing consciousness). Second of all, I'm not sure that the self-referential perspective taking leads to actually experiencing all the qualia in my life. But it's a new concept I haven't run into before as an explanation, and I'm going to think about it for a while.

Finally, I have to ping him for dismissing non-human animals from having many mental abilities in here. He's clearly someone who's built a rock star career on testing things, but he categorically says no animals but humans are self-aware, or capable of metaphor, or abstract thought - or humor! I'll give him (complex) language, but only because that's been tested (and I think Alex the gray parrot may surprise him for the level of complexity he's talking about). Why couldn't he remain agnostic about those things? As he points out, a hundred years ago animals were considered incapable of suffering because stentorian scientists said animals were all automata. And any time I'm aware of that someone has finally come up with an experiment to test some ability of animals, they come out pretty impressively (can monkeys count? Can parrots add? Can dogs take the perspective of someone else? Do fish fall for optical illusions? Can they distinguish musical genres?) Also, one time I fell down and my dog laughed at me. How could I tell he was laughing? I don't know, but he was delighted. Maybe it was how his eyes danced at the alpha being so humiliated. Ramachandran had no business making blanket statements about things untested, and it was largely unnecessary - we can talk about the wonders of the human brain without saying other animals haven't got them.

Nevertheless, this ranks up there with Dennett's Consciousness Explained and Pinker's How the Mind Works in the pantheon of consciousness-pondering books. ...more

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