A Brief Tour of Human Consciousness: From Impostor Poodles to Purple Numbers

V.S. Ramachandran characterizes his work with a chapter epigraph that is a comment Sherlock Holmes delivered to his foil, Watson: "You know my method, Watson. It is founded upon the observation of trifles" (p. 60). To give you some small flavor of his work, consider the following trifle that Ramachandran used to create a neuroscientific bridge from ethology (the study of animal behavior) to aesthetics (the study of beauty). "Scientists observed that herring-gull chicks will start pecking their mother's red-spotted yellow beak immediately upon hatching. The mother responds by regurgitating food to feed her youngsters. Scientists also discovered that the mother doesn't even need to be there, as the chicks will also peck at a fake yellow beak. Even more amazing, the chicks will peck at a stick with three red stripes on it with more intensity than their pecks on mother's beak: 'They preferred it to a real beak, even though it didn't resemble a beak'" (p. 46). Ramachandran isolated this phenomenon under the neurological fact that our brains are wired to do the greatest amount of work possible with the least amount of work, and built it to an understanding of why humans enjoy abstract art. Using the example of the chick that "is absolutely mesmerized," Ramachandran delivered his "punch-line about art" (p. 47). "If herring-chicks had an art gallery, they would hang a long stick with three stripes on the wall; they would worship it, pay millions of dollars for it, call it a Picasso, but not understand why-why they are mesmerized by this thing even though it doesn't resemble anything. That's all any art lover is doing when buying contemporary art: behaving exactly like those gull chicks" (p. 47). Ramachandran provided these explanations as a window to the neuroscientist's approach to phenomenon, but he did not see these explanations in competition with the mystery of existence. "Many social scientists feel rather deflated when informed that beauty, charity, piety and love are the activity of neurons in the brain, but their disappointment is based on the false assumption that to explain a complex phenomenon in terms of its component parts ("reductionism") is to explain it away" (p. 57). To illustrate this point, he described a man in love with a woman named Esmerelda. "I tell you about the activity in her septum, in her hypothalamic nuclei, and how certain peptides are released along with the affiliation hormone prolactin, etc. You might then turn to her and say, 'You mean that's all there is to it? Your love isn't real? It's all just chemicals?' To which Esmerelda should respond, 'On the contrary, all this brain activity provides hard evidence that I do love you, that I'm not just faking it. It should increase your confidence in the reality of my love.' And the same argument holds for art or piety or wit" (p. 59). In the most important section of this short book (the text is 112 pages with 44 pages of rich endnotes), Ramachandran br

I realized after reading the beginning of this book that I had already read the author's much longer work---Phantoms in the Brain---and thought it was among the best scientific books I've ever read. This book is VERY brief---it fools you as about half way through the pages it's over, and the rest is notes (interesting notes) and a glossery---but it's also wonderful! It presents many, many cases of fascinating things that can happen with the human brain and consciousness---thinking people are imposters, feeling like you are dead and being able to see colors when you see numbers. I have read before about synesthesia, where senses are mixed up, but I was like many people---quite skeptical that it actually existed. The author managed to make me a believer by showing how tests could actually prove it does happen! The writing tone here is terrific---funny without being flip, highly intelligent without being hard to understand. You will want to rush out and get the main course---Phantoms in the Brain!

I attended the 2005 Skeptics Society conference on Brain, Mind, and Consciousness at Caltech, where Ramachandran had been scheduled to speak but was unable to do so because of a family emergency. Although I was not previously familiar with his work, the description led me to believe he was a speaker I would be interested in hearing, and this book, which I purchased at the conference, provides a strong case for that. I've long had an interest in philosophy of mind and cognitive science, and minored in cognitive science in my Ph.D. studies (never completed) at the University of Arizona. I've been out of academia for 11 years now, and apart from reading occasional works like Daniel Dennett's Consciousness Explained and Freedom Evolves, I've not been keeping close tabs on the field. The conference and this book were quite a pleasure--it is clear that there have been some significant developments over the last decade. It is hard to believe that there are still people who think the brain is little more than a radio receiver, a set of mechanical controls for a disembodied spirit to manipulate the body. Ramachandran's book--like the case studies of Oliver Sacks and A.N. Luria--shows how wrongheaded that view is. This is a thin (112 pages of text, 45 pages of notes), very accessible and entertaining book. If you enjoy the works of Sacks and Luria, you are likely to enjoy this as well. This is not a collection of case studies, though there are some descriptions of particular patients--it is written from a higher elevation, bringing together recent results, explaining unusual phenomena, and speculating about how those phenomena may tie in to a further understanding of the details of the brain's function. The book came from Ramachandran's BBC Reith lectures, so it is for a popular audience, with the notes providing some more underlying detail. There are five chapters, each dealing with a single topic. The first chapter is about amputees who experience pain in their "phantom limbs" and how the parts of the brain which had been devoted to the now-absent limbs can become mapped to still-present parts of the body which are handled by physically proximate parts of the brain. For example, a patient whose left arm had been amputated could feel contact to the nonexistent fingers of his left hand from touches to parts of his face or upper arm. Ramachandran then uses this remapping phenomenon to speculate about the causes of Capgras' syndrome (where a patient believes people he knows have been replaced with impostors), synesthesia, and pain asymbolia, where a patient responds to pain stimulus with laughter. The second chapter is about vision, and specifically about the phenomena of blindsight (where a person has no experience of seeing, but at an unconscious level does see), hemisphere neglect, and mirror agnosia. In this chapter Ramachandran discusses "mirror neurons," neurons found in monkeys which activate when a monkey performs some task, but also when the

This book is an expansion and revision of a series of talks that the author gave as the 2003 Reith Lectures on BBC Radio. The BBC title was "The Emerging Mind." To summarize the book in a few inaccurate words, the author presents the contributions that neuropathology and the study of unusual perceptual modes like synaesthesia make to the study of the mind considered as a collection of brain structures that process sensory data and the self considered as a metarepresentation within such a mind. Despite the complex ideas, the discussion is lucid and engaging. Dr. Ramachandran has the courage to suggest new hypotheses and to propose experiments to test them, and he also has a sense of humor. The author writes in the Introduction, "As my colleague Oliver Sacks said of one of his books: `the real book is in the endnotes, Rama,`" which is certainly true of this edition. There are 45 pages of endnotes for 112 pages of text. The endnotes contain the most interesting discussions and the clearest exposition, which is why I was very disappointed to see that endnotes 11 and 12, the final pair of endnotes in the last chapter, appear to be missing from the Endnotes section. I would really like to read what the author has to say about Anton's syndrome and hypnotic induction. Perhaps the author or publisher could post these on a website somewhere. The Glossary in the back of the book is substantially the same as the one provided on the BBC website for the original talks. Because of the nature of the subject, it contains both technical scientific terms like _phosphorylation_ and some philosophical terms like _qualia_. The Glossary does not contain the term _exaption_, not used in the text of original talks but used several times in the book, which I found difficult. The author, who names Shiva Dakshinamurthy, Lord of Gnosis, as one of the dedicatees of this volume, grew up in Thailand and received his medical degree in India; yet he may mention South Asian philosophy less in this book than the average Western writer who produces a book on the brain for popular consumption. Laboratory experiments drive Dr. Ramachandran's speculation. Nevertheless, because he suggests the relationship between _qualia_ and underlying anatomy and chemistry is not entirely arbitrary, some of us may wish to conclude that introspection is more valuable than is often supposed. The author also writes about the cross-cultural aspects of art, suggesting that there may be some universals of aesthetics; I found this discussion provocative, but not entirely persuasive. Of course, younger readers who are eager to know more about neuroscience and the directions that such research will proceed in the future should read this book; moreover, older readers like myself with aging brains and perceptual systems may find their need to read this book is urgent and immediate.