Phantoms In The Brain: Probing The Mysteries Of The Human Mind (1999) - Plot & Excerpts
Francis Crick—the "Crick" half of the famous "Watson and Crick" duo that discovered the structure of DNA—coined a term (and used it as the title for his book on the subject) called The Astonishing Hypothesis, which represents the idea that all human cognition and perception—every emotion, belief, existential crisis, perceived sight, sound, smell, etc—is essentially the product of (or equivalent to) complex clusters and pathways of neurons and the synaptic connections of neurotransmitters that bind them, encased in bone, and in flux like most things. And as Crick once said: "There is no scientific study more vital to man than the study of his own brain. Our entire view of the universe depends on it."And just as matter of historical perspective and novelty: Lucretius, a brilliant Roman poet and Epicurian philosopher (circa 99 BC) proposed the same basic idea that lies at the heart of The Astonishing Hypothesis: "At this stage you must admit that whatever is seen to be sentient is nevertheless composed of atoms that are insentient. The phenomena open to our observation do not contradict this conclusion or conflict with it. Rather they lead us by the hand and compel us to believe that the animate is born, as I maintain, of the insentient."V.S. Ramachandran has run with The Astonishing Hypothesis in ways like no other pop-science writer has—with the possible exception of Oliver Sacks (who writes a wonderful intro to this book, by the way).Let's start with a quote from Rama (as I’ll lovingly call him for the rest of the review) that isn’t from this book but gives some sense of scale and scope to what we’re dealing with here when we pursue the implications of The Astonishing Hypothesis: "The human brain, it has been said, is the most complexly organised structure in the universe and to appreciate this you just have to look at some numbers. The brain is made up of one hundred billion nerve cells or "neurons" which is the basic structural and functional units of the nervous system. Each neuron makes something like a thousand to ten thousand contacts with other neurons and these points of contact are called synapses where exchange of information occurs. And based on this information, someone has calculated that the number of possible permutations and combinations of brain activity, in other words the numbers of brain states, exceeds the number of elementary particles in the known universe."A quick word on Rama’s overall style: He prides himself—like any good pop-science writer—on being able to make technical, complex topics comprehensible to the layperson. He accomplishes this in spades. He doesn’t condescend and he doesn’t dumb anything down, rather he’s just charismatic (you should see him speak in person), well-educated in more fields than merely his specialty (he’ll drop Shakespeare quotations, references to pop culture, sociology, history and cutting edge philosophy all in the same page), and just knows how to turn a pleasing phrase (rich metaphors and lucid prose abound). He really captures the childlike wonder and openness to evidentiary trajectories and discovery that is an ideal in science. He often compares his work to that of his boyhood hero Sherlock Holmes. He’s a brain-detective tracking down the roots of these various strangest of strange phantoms found lurking ‘round the human brain. Basically, this is the purest antidote to dry, technical writing, and it seems to sacrifice none of the scientific rigor in the process. A truly stunning feat that I’ve only seen a few other authors pull off as well (Steven Pinker and Oliver Sacks both come to mind). This particular work of Rama’s focuses on some of the strangest, most fascinating, and philosophically rich territory that’s been eked out in the relatively young but incredibly productive and conceptually-expansive history of cognitive neuroscience. At many points I found my jaw dropping further than I thought possible as each page went by. He covers SO MANY interesting neuro-psychological/-behavioral phenomena that it’s difficult to know what to highlight and what to gloss over—there’s just too much for a GoodReads review. Plus, some should be left for you potential readers to happily find on your own (and what I summarize is extremely brief and surface-level anyway). Phantom LimbsOne of the areas Rama is most well-known for is the revolutionary work he’s done with understanding and curing phantom limb pain. Most people know what this phenomenon consists of: a person loses a body part, most often some section of their arm or leg or the whole thing (though he also mentions rarer instances of phantom penises and phantom breasts) and they begin to have very, very vivid sensations that the limb is still there. The problem often times is that they can’t control what this phantom limb does or how it feels. Commonly, people have the painful sensation that their phantom hand is clenched as tight as can be, to cite one of many examples. Rama discovered a simple and ingenious way to sooth and eventually eliminate these pains. He set up a box with a mirror in it that looks like this: When he first tried this out on a person who was in agonizing pain they immediately felt a torrent of relief--the phantom limb sufferer described it as an instantaneous and entirely vivid sensation of being able to finally unclench his excrusiatingly painful clenched phantom fist, immediately. The basic idea is that the brain is tricked into believing that that missing limb is present and when the actual remaining limb moves it gives the equally vivid sensation that the phantom limb is moving in that same willful way. This exercise is done and as time goes on it becomes less and less necessary as the phantom pains become less and less frequent. He cracks a great joke about being the first person to ever amputate a phantom limb. It’s utterly brilliant and a fine humanitarian service that he’s brought to many, many people suffering from what was until his fairly recent discovery such a baffling phenomenon. Capgras SyndromeThis one’s really interesting and rife with all kinds of psychological and philosophical implications. Capgras syndrome is when a person begins to think that people they know and recognize perfectly well are imposters. One main example in the chapter "The Unbearable Likeness of Being" is a young man who had a near fatal car accident which put him into a coma for three weeks. All of his normal functions like talking and walking were restored through physical therapy, but one very peculiar feature remained: he insists that his parents are not his parents. Though he acknowledges the perfect physical similarity and is otherwise perfectly rational he simply cannot be convinced that these kindly older people taking care of him are anything but doppelgangers. Fucking weird, right? Well, there are many more cases of this syndrome than this, so it’s not even quite as rare as one would first guess, and Rama gracefully travels through the cognitive neuroscientific netherworld that lies behind this phenomena with some amazing theories guiding him along the way and developing in his wake. If for no other reason, read this book because of what you’ll learn about Capgras syndrome and... Cotard SyndromeIn Synecdoche, New York, the most recent film by (and directorial debut of) Charlie Kaufman, the central character’s name is (non-coincidently) Caden Cotard. While he doesn’t have the neurological syndrome he does spend large parts of the film fretting about death (it’s a wonderful film, don’t let this description fool you). Actual people with Cotard’s syndrome are either completely convinced that they are already dead or are decaying. They often swear that they can smell their own rotting flesh, etc. Before we jump to the conclusion that these people are just wrist-slitting goth kids prone to hyperbole or just crazy, we need to take the brain’s eye view with Rama as our guide. And a note about the "just crazy" remark I just made: He stresses throughout this book that it is a profound mistake to send the patients he describes straight to the psychiatrist or the loony bin. And he’s always right to do this. There is some time spent arguing against old paradigms of psychology and psychiatry and cultural theory and sociology—even though he does give Freud credit where credit is due and shows us how Freud had seeds of wisdom, but that the seeds need to be fostered by all of the new knowledge and innovation and (most importantly) positive results brought about by the paradigm-shift of cognitive neuroscience when it comes to treating people with these strangest of mental states and behaviors.Alright, there are so many other major points of interest I could go into but I’m calling it quits for now. A short list of other great topics: —Phantom pregnancies—People literally laughing themselves to death—The ins and outs of the placebo effect—Mirror neurons and their relationship to empathy—Blind sight (an incredible phenomenon, look it up)—The pros and cons of evolutionary psychology—People who completely neglect one entire side of their body and do not—and cannot—realize it—The neurological underpinnings of religious revelations and ecstasies—And more! One last word on... ConsciousnessI tend to approach all of neuroscience with the eyes of a philosopher—meaning, I don’t really have an aptitude for the finer, more technical details, and that there’s basically a constant running commentary in the back of my mind (at least) when I approach the brain which is pondering the ever-increasing philosophical discourse about the nature of consciousness itself. This also easily lends itself to more "existential" thoughts about the obvious which can be more or less boiled down to this: if a person’s conscious experience is the brain or is a product of the brain (the distinctions here will cause most of your eyes to glaze over, so I’ll be be silent on that for now) then its dissolution is our dissolution. In other words, this kind of stuff practically urges a person to consider the inevitability of mortality to some degree or another. While Rama bypasses all extended musings on the meaning of life and death, he does take a mighty swing at the philosophical debates about consciousness in the final chapter. He’s quite philosophically astute for a neuroscientist with no formal philosophical education. He’s also collaborated with fellow UC-San Diego professor (of philosophy) Patricia Churchland which—for fans of philosophy and science—is basically a dream team. Patricia and her husband Paul are basically the forebearers of a subfield of study called neurophilosophy, which I see as the wave of the future and one of the only hopes for academic philosophy to remain (or become, depending on your station in life) relevant and exciting, and also as a useful clarifying tool for cognitive neuroscience and perhaps science and all the other seriously probing disciplines generally.I'll continue to urge many people to read this book. It’s maximally eye-opening, entertaining and thought provoking.
I begin to like Dr. Ramachandran. Such a remarkable, intelligent, and humble man, someone who would make a nice companion during long campfires. The phantom limbs this book famously talks about is well-known now. But it talks about much more than that. The brain is after all a complex thing. We hardly understand how it ticks and many things that pass on as bogus, like clairvoyance, are not completely unprovable given the limitations of brain study. That Ramachandran is willing to stray into the tall claims made by mystics is a wonder and a joy because most of the self-serious scientists don't like to get their hands dirty.The book informs us that phantom limbs occur because the brain's "body image" - the mapping of each body part in the brain - gets altered due to shock or some other reason. This is a plausible theory. Consider a man who has an amputated leg and whenever he reaches an orgasm he feels it in his phantom leg and not in the penis. The reason is not, as Frued suggested years ago while explaining foot fetish, that the feet resemble the phallus. But because the sensors for the leg and the penis are quite close in the "body image". This is interesting. Consider also that in female brains the sensors for earlobe and nipples are quite close - the rest is elementary. But this "body image" may get altered, resulting in messed up, baffling signals, the kind patients with phantom limbs feel. In fact, normal people can also feel something like it. Take this experiment:Ask two of your friends to join you. Call them A and B. Sit in a chair. Ask A to sit in front of you in another chair. Blindfold your eyes. Now ask B to take your hand and periodically tickle A's nose and at the same time tickle your nose with another hand. Simple. But after some 30 to 40 seconds you will feel that A's nose is your nose, the one being tickled by your hand, and not the one on your body. This "nose outside my body" experience happens because the "body image" gets slightly altered because of the experiment. The fact of the matter is as Dr. Ramachandran explains:"Your body image, despite all its appearance of durability is an entirely transitory internal construct that can be profoundly modified with a few simple tricks. It is merely a shell you have temporarily created for successfully passing your genes to your offspring."Along the way he sheds light on a new discovery about how we perceive the world. A simple act of seeing is distributed among multiple visual areas and division of labor among the two - the "how" and "what" - pathways. A small imbalance in these pathways can cause disastrous effects. A real case study tells about a woman with such a deformity who could see perfectly well but could never sense motion. This meant this she could never cross a road because she could not see continuous movement, only static snapshots. A simple event of filling coffee was always troublesome because the snapshots won't tell her when her cup was about to spill. It tells us that we don't understand vision completely.Dr. Ramachandran writes: "If I toss a red ball at you, several far-flung visual areas in your brains are activated simultaneously, but what you see is a single unified picture of the ball. Does this unification come about because there is a later place in the brain where all this information is put together - what the philosopher Dan Dennett calls a Cartesian Theater? Or are there connections between these areas so that their simultaneous activation leads directly to a sort of synchronized firing pattern that in turn creates perpetual unity? This question - the so-called binding problem, is one of the many unresolved riddles in neuroscience."Stroke patients sometimes go into denial or repress the fact of the paralysis and although these baffling acts confuse doctors, some brave neurologists actually find parallels of these behavior with Freudian concepts like "repression", "denial", "reaction formation" and the like. It is an opportunity for them to test Freud's theories because although we all display such behavior in our day to day life, in these unfortunate patients the intensity is tenfold, giving enough material to hold an experiment. Even though Freud bashing is a popular intellectual pastime, Ramachandran believes that he had some valuable insights up his sleeve about our psychological defenses. Many strange sightings of ghosts, angels, UFOs may be due to ocular pathology, a malfunction called Charles Bonnet syndrome. The pleasure of this book arises from Dr. Ramachandran's enthusiastic writing style, presenting one case study after another, giving us proper details that lead to the "wow" moment - the discovery of something new about the brain, and along the way he makes us feel like Sherlock Holmes (a figure that significantly inspired him to join medicine). During the reading of the book I was mostly agile and curious to know what would come next. Not many popular science books are like that. Though some present excellent ideas, they hamper the reading experience by either being too verbose/dull or too technical.We learn from this book that a lot of what we know about the curious sounding functions of the brain is by studying patients with deformities or malfunction, a method used by psychoanalysts in the past, but today's neurologists rely on sophisticated observations and not educated guesses. What does all the case studies tell us? That most of the brain processes run by comparisons and not by absolute values. You never know what you may end up finding next. I don't know about others, but I take comfort in that idea. That this reality, my reality, the way I perceive it, the things that I understand, the things that I don't, everything has my brain at its center. It makes me who I am. I am not speaking as an Idealist, but a lot of what goes around in life is constantly scanned by my brain. I cannot deny its influence. The brain is powerful enough to generate a religious experience. Even intense religious experiences are traced to the limbic system, but Dr. Ramachandran is humble enough to state that the existence of God cannot be denied on empirical grounds. In the later chapters he dwells on pseudocyesis - a condition in which a woman experiences all the signs of pregnancy, swollen belly, lactating breasts and the like, but there is one thing missing: the baby! The fake pregnancy is the result of a delusion. How f*ed-up is that! Listen to this now: a rare few men who show extreme sympathy towards their pregnant wives start showing signs of pregnancy. They even start lactating. People, lets all bow down to the power of the mind! Reading this book, I have secretly started believing that if it can make such improbable things true, if only one could train it in the right direction and draw amazing fruits from it (the way new age mystics claim all the time). It helps me to know that something intriguing may happen tomorrow that today I find impossible. It would not be a miracle. It would just be a new thing I would learn about myself, about my mental abilities. We may not end up knowing everything about the brain, because it looks like an infinite machine, but there is comfort in the fact that there is a lot more to learn. It will be exciting. It will keep us busy.
What do You think about Phantoms In The Brain: Probing The Mysteries Of The Human Mind (1999)?
Phantoms in the Brain is one of the most fascinating books I've ever read. Ramachandran, world-renowned neuroscientist, revolutionizes our traditional notions of self-awareness. The title "Phantoms in the Brain" perfectly captures the essence of his thesis: countless process are being executed by our brain without our knowledge. In fact, our self-awareness is only a tiny aspect of our neurological existence.While this is a science book filled with technical information, Rama is always concerned with the people involved. We're introduced to individuals on a name basis who have suffered extraordinary injuries that reveal how the brain operates. One patient developed a blind spot filled with cartoon characters. Another person has a stroke and swears their paralyzed arm doesn't belong to her. Rama is utterly fascinated by these bizarre occurrences because they are clues leading to the bigger mystery of how our brain works.In each chapter, Rama is like a detective. He's given an apparently unsolvable case with a handful of facts. Slowly he begins putting together a neurological scenario, calling in the suspects: frontal lobe, hippocampus, thalamus. Finally the validity of his theory is tested by the patient's recovery.Lastly Rama is more than a scientist. He's a philosopher to neurology much like Carl Jung is to psychology. His more radical ideas of our mental lives verge on mysticism and outright science fiction."I think. Science--cosmology, evolution and especially the brain sciences--is telling us that we have no privileged position in the universe and that our sense of having a private nonmaterial soul "watching the world" is really an illusion (as has long been emphasized by Eastern mystical traditions like Hinduism and Zen Buddhism)."New discoveries have always disturbed people. Rama's research is powerful enough to elicit a paradigm shift in the same way Galileo presented irrefutable evidence that the earth revolves around sun. We, as our self-awareness, are not the center of our mental universe."Once you realize that far from being a spectator, you are in fact part of the eternal ebb and flow of events in the cosmos, this realization is very liberating. Ultimately this idea also allows you to cultivate a certain humility--the essence of all authentic religious experience."
—Ismael Galvan
pag. 284: "In fondo sgomenta sentirsi dire che la propria vita e tutte le proprie speranze, vittorie e aspirazioni sono solo frutto dell'attività dei neuroni cerebrali. Ma in realtà quest'idea, lungi dall'umiliare, a mio avviso nobilita. La scienza (la cosmologia, la teoria dell'evoluzione e soprattutto le neuroscienze) ci sta dicendo che non abbiamo una posizione privilegiata nell'universo, e che l'impressione di possedere un'anima individuale e immateriale che <> è in realtà un'illusione (come da tempo avevano sottolineato religioni mistiche orientali come l'induismo e il buddismo zen)"Riporterei volentieri per intero le ultime riflessioni di Ramachandran (pagine 284-285 del libro; le altre pagine sono dedicate alle note). Un libro affascinante in cui l'Autore riporta in uno stile scorrevole e divulgativo alcuni risultati di ricerche e osservazioni nel campo delle neuroscienze, ottenuti soprattutto grazie a pazienti affetti da lesioni del sistema nervoso centrale, oppure da squilibri dello stesso generati da problemi periferici (come la sindrome dell'arto fantasma nei pazienti amputati).A differenza di altre trattazioni, traspare un approccio che, se mantiene solide fondamenta scientifiche e razionali e un profondo disincanto, sembra animato da un'umile e silenziosa spiritualità che emerge sporadicamente in pochissimi punti del testo, come in queste frasi che ho riportato.Restano aperte innumerevoli questioni che riguardano la natura del sé e della nostra sensazione di unitarietà nello spazio e nel tempo.Da leggere e, per quel che mi riguarda, da rileggere.
—Donatella
A solid set of neurology case-studies, in the tradition of Oliver Sacks. Ramachandran seems to have made his name explaining how different kinds of phantom limb syndromes function, and he's at his best when he's explaining the weird and miraculous ways the brain copes with the sudden loss of a part of the body. Also very good is the middle portion of the book, when he expands his survey to related neurological problems, including temporal lobe epilepsy (which seems to put some patients into direct rapport with God) and anosognosia (where the patient refuses to recognize a part of the body is paralyzed). Some of the later chapters, where Ramachandran goes further afield into evolutionary psychology (a/k/a sociobiology), and various theories of consciousness, feel a little light and overly speculative-- for that stuff I'd stick with E.O. Wilson or Daniel Dennett. But overall, a very interesting read, made easier by frequent diagrams and Ramachandran's engaging prose style.
—Jake
