When babies are born, we’re happy if the weight of the infant is about 4 to 6 pounds. Adult brains that recognize this joy are often removed from a unique realization then. The adult brain is about 3 pounds of jelly itself, evenas it perceives the visual of the baby via its occipital cortex. By complex circuitry the same visual signals emotive states such as parenting joy in the adult brain. This human brain can imagine angles, contemplate the meaning of infinity and question its own place in the universe. Not since Carl Sagan’s book Broca’s Brain have I personally come across a book of science so lucidly expressed for the popularization of current scientific facts on the human brain. While VS’s preceding book Phantoms in the Brain was also a best-seller, I find this one particularly engaging. By his own admission, he has new things to say in the Tell-Tale Brain about his earlier findings and observations. That is what the scientific temperament is about. It is about self-correction through the method of science. Explanation is what the scientist offers after assuring oneself of the verifiability of one’s findings.
Cognitive neuro-science is also a domain that Daniel Goleman leans on to speak about Emotional Intelligence. Like Goleman, Ramachandran too pronounces the evolution in thought from research enquiries in the neuro-sciences. For the methodically conscious, case based explanation is a feature that runs richly through both Goleman’s Social Intelligence and Viliyanur Ramachandran’ s Tell-Tale Brain; their so called second-avatars in publishing. This speaks to the multi-sensory nature of phenomena we experience as also the object of enquiry here. This book stuns you through its research evidence. The evidence is out there in brief episodic narrations of research cases.
“These (cases) may sound like phantasmagorical short stories”, but essentially they are all true. In Ramachandran’s opinion the most difficult question of all is “How does the human brain give rise to consciousness?” He concedes that this question comes ‘perilously close to theology’. I am reminded here of Einstein’s mention of the most important question in science “What will make this Universe a safe place to live in?” In order that VS prepares the reader to what must follow, he introduces appropriate frames of references. E.g. Phase transitions are sudden qualitative changes after a key point in incremental changes. Like ice melting at 32 degrees Fahrenheit, after moments of steady heating. Phase transitions, VS argues occur in social systems too. In evolutionary history therefore, our brains went through an explosive development in its key structures and functions. About a hundred and fifty thousand years ago, our brains went through a mental phase transition that marked the onset of full-fledged human language, artistic sensibilities, consciousness and self-awareness. Beyond genetic evolution, a faster pace of evolution was acted on our cultures through social learning.
Ramachandran’s writing from the neuro-sciences tickles the imagination and enlightens our comprehension. “Think of what happens when an arm is amputated. There is no longer an arm, but there is still a map of the arm in the brain. The job of this map, its raison d’etre, is to represent its arm. The arm may be gone but this brain map, having nothing better to do, soldiers on. …This map persistence explains the basic phantom limb phenomenon – why the felt presence of the limb persists long after the flesh-and-blood limb has been severed.”…I had this sudden flash of intuition once when helping a large client of a century’s legacy with its IT based change across the organisation. I held up for the top management the phantom’s limb metaphor and their cognition that related to an erstwhile pride. The market was severed from the firm in the moment of facilitation, but organisational memory and social mores held up the myth of corporate pride long after it outlived its erstwhile functionality. This experience quite connected with them. Information Technology would become their new neural pathway. Change was about forming the new habits required to survive in the new environment.
For long, medical students were told that neural connections were laid down at birth never to change from its fetus stages. Hence to expect recovery in damaged brain function was held as a lack of plasticity in the brain. When one eye has a retinal disorder the other makes up in offering information to the visual cortex that compensates for losses in stimuli. Evidence now shows that the adult human brain can change over distances of several centimeters. A great deep unity between structure, function and origin marks the living biological system. Unique mental traits have evolved through the novel deployment of brain structures that originally evolved for other reasons. The reader will find interesting facts of this nature throughout this book.
Our perception of the world ordinarily seems so effortless that we tend to take it for granted. The evolutionary proximity we humans have with apes or other mammals is another great reason to read this book. In the human brain for example, much more is known about the visual region than of higher order brain regions such as the frontal lobes, which are involved in such things as morality, compassion and ambition. Language, visual acuity, mental dysfunctions are treated through the neurological paradigm. Each such theme is elaborately treated in this book. Yet that does not prevent the author from stating his scientific bias. He states that the only way to figure out neural activity is to open the black box or directly experimenting on the brain. He calls out the three ways to approach this object of enquiry; each of which can culminate in narrow ended specializations. These specializations are
- Neurology : studying patients with brain lesions
- Neurophysiology : monitoring the activity of neural circuits or even single cells
- Brain Imaging.
Methodology in science and philosophy of knowledge will therefore beset this frontier of human understanding as well. Hence the reader could do well to reflect beyond the episodic tales of patients whose Galvanic Skin Response for the Capgras syndrome causes quite a flutter of perceptual complexity. Imagine a patient complaining that he sees an impostor that looks like his mother with a corresponding increase in the Galvanic Skin Response. Actually, it is his mother, but he terms her an impostor with no mischief in intent. The myriad pathway of the visual apparatus in our brains is ‘mind-boggling’. Of equal challenge is the empiricism to deal with such cases from a neuro-scientific basis without resorting to psychiatric treatment. You will enjoy reading such cases in the book.
Consider the word synthesia. Now read the next word - synesthesia. Synthesia is a video game for Windows and Mac OS X (also working in Wine on Linux) which allows users to play a MIDI keyboard or use a computer keyboard in time to a MIDI file by following on-screen directions, much in the style of Keyboard Mania or Guitar Hero. Synesthesia on the other hand is a surreal blending of sensation, perception and emotion. Syneshtetes, as such people are called experience a kind of no-man’s land between reality and fantasy. They taste colors, see sounds, hear shapes or even touch emotions in myriad combinations, to experience the world extraordinarily. As for the word synthesia, you could go to the internet and learn the piano without an instructor of human form! (http://www.synthesiagame.com/)
Not only is VS’s decoding of synesthetic phenomena remarkable; he pulls it off with a literary flair. “Science traffics in objective evidence, so any ‘observations’ we make about people’s subjective experience are necessarily indirect or secondhand”. He then impresses us about the single-subject case method as the provider of such knowledge. Perhaps as he argues, creative people are better at metaphors because they are synesthetes. Those trained in Neuro-Linguistic Programming will recognize the sensory bias in his statement “Synesthesia is best thought of as an example of sub-pathological cross-modal interactions that could be a signature or marker for creativity”.
Civility is a term that goes with grace and proper conduct. Our mirror neurons get triggered through two principal media – language and imitation. Culture has invested in sophistry and imitation that most other species do not engage in. We evolve glacially (slowly) compared to fish or birds from birth to adolescence and adulthood. Our species has traded off long-term risks in such an evolutionary track. VS teases out from research and the biology of proximate species the anatomical differentiators and the phase change evolutions of the human brain. Mirror neurons are one such feature. Imitation is a gift thereof.
The author’s special emphasis on our species capability for introspection is the unique contribution in this book. This Nobel Laureate expounds each of the following 7 aspects of the ‘self’ or at the very least his intuitions of the self in great scientific detail. Each of these is vulnerable to disorders, delusions and illusions! Yet these are the legs on which the table of the self stands.
- Unity – Despite the deluge of sensory information, you feel like ONE person.
- Continuity – Sliding temporal dimensions between past, present and future in a continuity of identity
- Embodiment – Anchoring of your experience is in the same body as the one experiencing it
- Privacy – Your mental life is your own, unobservable by others. Despite empathy, you cannot experience another’s pain
- Social embedding – The self needs to feel part of the social environment that it interacts with. It cannot have meaning in a social vacuum
- Free Will - At least two areas of the brain are involved in free will. One conjures up choices, the other makes you desire one over others, based on a hierarchy of values dictated by the pre-frontal cortex
- Self-awareness - This aspect of the self is almost axiomatic; a self that is not aware of itself is an oxymoron. When you use the word ‘self-conscious’ – you actually mean that you are conscious of someone else being conscious of you.
VS’s empirical treatment of the above in his last chapters can bogus certain Freudian frames and psychiatric diagnoses with the disdain that his cognitive paradigms unravel. The adventure he embarks on for a living is supreme. I read this book with the deep seated desire to understand the self. It is psychologically impossible to understand others, unless one loves one’s mirror dimension in our own selves. As human beings, wandering into metaphysics and the origin of our species is an inescapable feature of one’s curiosity. This book in good measure traverses an equivalent of inter-stellar distance of mystery regarding the self- through our complex brain. It tells tales through people whom we need to understand with compassion, from that seat of our evolved brain – the pre-frontal lobes. We must also ask ourselves how sharp our senses are in the deluge of information we experience in an age of communication exuberance. The Glossary section of 12 pages is a treasure of medical terms and philosophical methods. This book is stimulating, nourishing in an educating way and a gift of the scientific method. The boundary between purposeful evolution and mindless destruction of our species is contrasted elegantly by such a book.
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