V.s. Ramachandran Quotes

How can a three-pound mass of jelly that you can hold in your palm imagine angels, contemplate the meaning of infinity, and even question its own place in the cosmos? Especially awe inspiring is the fact that any single brain, including yours, is made up of atoms that were forged in the hearts of countless, far-flung stars billions of years ago. These particles drifted for eons and light-years until gravity and change brought them together here, now. These atoms now form a conglomerate- your brain- that can not only ponder the very stars that gave it birth but can also think about its own ability to think and wonder about its own ability to wonder. With the arrival of humans, it has been said, the universe has suddenly become conscious of itself. This, truly, it the greatest mystery of all.

Indeed, the line between perceiving and hallucinating is not as crisp as we like to think. In a sense, when we look at the world, we are hallucinating all the time. One could almost regard perception as the act of choosing the one hallucination that best fits the incoming data.

He had the arrogance of the believer, but none of the humility of the deeply religious.

Self-awareness is a trait that not only makes us human but also paradoxically makes us want to be more than merely human. As I said in my BBC Reith Lectures, “Science tells us we are merely beasts, but we don’t feel like that. We feel like angels trapped inside the bodies of beasts, forever craving transcendence

science should be question driven, not methodology driven.

Any ape can reach for a banana, but only humans can reach for the stars.

Science tells us we are merely beasts, but we don’t feel like that. We feel like angels trapped inside the bodies of beasts, forever craving transcendence.

Yet as human beings we have to accept-with humility-that the question of ultimate origins will always remain with us, no matter how deeply we understand the brain and the cosmos that it creates.

So here is the greatest irony of all: that the self that almost by definition is entirely private is to significant extent a social construct.

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.

What do we mean by "knowledge" or "understanding"? And how do billions of neurons achieve them? These are complete mysteries. Admittedly, cognitive neuroscientists are still very vague about the exact meaning of words like "understand," "think," and indeed the word "meaning" itself.

All good science emerges from an imaginative conception of what might be true.

Even though its common knowledge these days, it never ceases to amaze me that all the richness of our mental life - all our feelings, our emotions, our thoughts, our ambitions, our love life, our religious sentiments and even what each of us regards us his own intimate private self - is simply the activity of these little specks of jelly in your head, in your brain. There is nothing else.

How does language interact with thought? Does language enable us to think, or does thinking enable us to talk?

No engineer would have dreamed of such an inelegant solution, which goes to illustrate the opportunistic nature of evolution. (As Francis Crick once said, ‘God is a hacker, not an engineer.’)

The law of perceptual problem solving, or peekaboo, should now make more sense. It may have evolved to ensure that the search for visual solutions is inherently pleasurable rather than frustrating, so that you don’t give up too easily.

I learned an important lesson: Never take the obvious for granted. Once upon a time, it was so obvious that a four-pound rock would plummet earthward twice as fast as a two-pound rock that no one ever bothered to test it. That is, until Galileo Galilei came along and took ten minutes to perform an elegantly simple experiment that yielded a counterintuitive result and changed the course of history.

The purpose of all of this (left hemisphere's way of choosing denial or repression over considering an anomaly) is to impose stability on behavior and to prevent vacillation because indecisiveness doesn't serve any purpose. Any decision, so long as it is probably correct, is better than no decision at all. A perpetually fickle general will never win a war.

One of the first things we teach medical students is to listen to the patient by taking a careful medical history. Ninety percent of the time, you can arrive at an uncannily accurate diagnosis by paying close attention, using physical examination and sophisticated lab test to confirm your hunch (and to increase the bill to the insurance company).

The common denominator of all jokes is a path of expectation that is diverted by an unexpected twist necessitating a complete reinterpretation of all the previous facts — the punch-line…Reinterpretation alone is insufficient. The new model must be inconsequential. For example, a portly gentleman walking toward his car slips on a banana peel and falls. If he breaks his head and blood spills out, obviously you are not going to laugh. You are going to rush to the telephone and call an ambulance. But if he simply wipes off the goo from his face, looks around him, and then gets up, you start laughing. The reason is, I suggest, because now you know it’s inconsequential, no real harm has been done. I would argue that laughter is nature’s way of signaling that "it’s a false alarm." Why is this useful from an evolutionary standpoint? I suggest that the rhythmic staccato sound of laughter evolved to inform our kin who share our genes; don’t waste your precious resources on this situation; it’s a false alarm. Laughter is nature’s OK signal.

It’s as if each of us is hallucinating all the time and what we call perception involves merely selecting the one hallucination that best matches the current input.

Homogeneity breeds weakness: theoretical blind spots, stale paradigms, an echo-chamber mentality, and cults of personality.

It is difficult to overstate the importance of understanding mirror neurons and their function. They may well be central to social learning, imitation, and the cultural transmission of skills and attitudes—perhaps even of the pressed-together sound clusters we call words. By hyperdeveloping the mirror-neuron system, evolution in effect turned culture into the new genome. Armed with culture, humans could adapt to hostile new environments and figure out how to exploit formerly inaccessible or poisonous food sources in just one or two generations—instead of the hundreds or thousands of generations such adaptations would have taken to accomplish through genetic evolution. Thus culture became a significant new source of evolutionary pressure, which helped select brains that had even better mirror-neuron systems and the imitative learning associated with them. The result was one of the many self-amplifying snowball effects that culminated in Homo sapiens, the ape that looked into its own mind and saw the whole cosmos reflected inside.

Getting trapped in narrow cul-de-sac specializations and “clubs” whose membership is open only to those who congratulate and fund each other is an occupational hazard in modern science

Indeed, one could go so far as to say that humor helps as an effective antidote against a useless struggle against the ultimate danger: the ever-present fear of death in self-conscious beings like us.

How does language interact with thought? Does language enable us to think, or does thinking enable us to talk? Can we think in a sophisticated manner without silent internal speech? And lastly, how did this extraordinarily complex, multicomponent system originally come into existence in our hominin ancestors?

Art can be thought of as a form of visual foreplay before the climax.

Indeed, the line between perceiving and hallucinating is not as crisp as we like to think. In a sense, when we look at the world, we are hallucinating all the time. One could almost regard perception as the act of choosing the one hallucination that best fits the incoming data, which is often fragmentary and fleeting. Both hallucinations and real perceptions emerge from the same set of processes. The crucial difference is that when we are perceiving, the stability of external objects and events helps anchor them. When we hallucinate, as when we dream or float in a sensory deprivation tank, objects and events wander off in any direction.

So the quest for biological laws shouldn’t be driven by a quest for simplicity or elegance. No woman who has been through labor would say that it’s an elegant solution to giving birth to a baby.

But in biological systems there is a deep unity between structure, function, and origin. You cannot make very much progress understanding any one of these unless you are also paying close attention to the other two.

I found myself drawn to biology, with all its frustrating yet fascinating complexities. When I was twelve, I remember reading about axolotls, which are basically a species of salamander that has evolved to remain permanently in the aquatic larval stage. They manage to keep their gills (rather than trading them in for lungs, like salamanders or frogs) by shutting down metamorphosis and becoming sexually mature in the water. I was completely flabbergasted when I read that by simply giving these creatures the “metamorphosis hormone” (thyroid extract) you could make the axolotl revert back into the extinct, land-dwelling, gill-less adult ancestor that it had evolved from. You could go back in time, resurrecting a prehistoric animal that no longer exists anywhere on Earth. I also knew that for some mysterious reason adult salamanders don’t regenerate amputated legs but the tadpoles do. My curiosity took me one step further, to the question of whether an axolotl—which is, after all, an “adult tadpole”—would retain its ability to regenerate a lost leg just as a modern frog tadpole does. And how many other axolotl-like beings exist on Earth, I wondered, that could be restored to their ancestral forms by simply giving them hormones? Could humans—who are after all apes that have evolved to retain many juvenile qualities—be made to revert to an ancestral form, perhaps something resembling Homo erectus, using the appropriate cocktail of hormones? My mind reeled out a stream of questions and speculations, and I was hooked on biology forever. I found mysteries and possibilities everywhere.

The real drive to understand the self, though, comes not from the need to develop treatments, but from a more deep-seated urge that we all share: the desire to understand ourselves. Once self-awareness emerged through evolution, it was inevitable that an organism would ask, ― Who am I? Across vast stretches of inhospitable space and immeasurable time, there suddenly emerged a person called Me or I. Where does this person come from? Why here? Why now? You, who are made of star-dust, are now standing on a cliff, gazing at the starlit sky pondering your own origins and your place in the cosmos.

This means that the two hemispheres may even have different beliefs. For example, the neurologist V. S. Ramanchandran describes one split-brain patient who, when asked if he was a believer or not, said he was an atheist, but his right brain declared he was a believer. Apparently, it is possible to have two opposing religious beliefs residing in the same brain. Ramachandran continues: “If that person dies, what happens? Does one hemisphere go to heaven and the other go to hell? I don’t know the answer to that.” (It

It's a good idea to begin with experiments on single cases and then to confirm the findings through studies of additional patients. By way of analogy, imagine that I cart a pig into your living room and tell you that it can talk. You might say, "Oh, really? Show me." I then wave my wand and the pig starts talking. You might respond, "My God! That's amazing!" You are not likely to say, "Ah, but that's just one pig. Show me a few more and then I might believe you." Yet this is precisely the attitude of many people in my field.

The TELL-TALE BRAIN A Neuroscientist’s Quest for What Makes Us Human V. S. RAMACHANDRAN

With the arrival of humans, it has been said, the universe has suddenly become conscious of itself. This, truly, is the greatest mystery of all.

adage that fact is stranger than fiction seems to be especially true for the workings of the brain.

Laughter is nature's ok signal.

It might weigh little over a kilogram but, taken on its own scale, the brain is unimaginably vast. One cubic millimetre contains between twenty and twenty-five thousand neurons. It has eighty-six billion of these cells, and each one is complex as a city and is in contact with ten thousand other neurons just like it. Within just one cubic centimetre of brain tissue, there is the same number of connections as there are stars in the Milky Way. Your brain contains a hundred trillion of them. Information in the form of electricity and chemicals flows around these paths in great forking trails and in circuits and feedback loops and fantastical storms of activity tat bloom to life speeds of up to a hundred and twenty metres per second. According to the neuroscientist V. S. Ramachandran, 'The number of permutations and combinations of activity that are theoretically possible exceeds the number of elementary particles in the universe.' And yet, he continues, 'We know so little about it that even a child's questions should be seriously entertained.

Neuroscientist V. S. Ramachandran’s work with phantom limbs seems to confirm the brain’s remarkable ability to create a sense of cognitive unity even if the reality (of many selves, and of many layers of consciousness) is more complex.

In his book The Telltale Brain, neuroscientist V. S. Ramachandran poetically explains: Any ape can reach for a banana, but only humans can reach for the stars. Apes live, contend, breed and die in forests—end of story. Humans write, investigate, and quest. We splice genes, split atoms, launch rockets. We peer upward . . . and delve deeply into the digits of pi. Perhaps most remarkably of all, we gaze inward, piecing together the puzzle of our own unique and marvelous brain . . . This, truly, is the greatest mystery of all.

Despite all their surface diversity, most jokes and funny incidents have the following logical structure: Typically you lead the listener along a garden path of expectation, slowly building up tension. At the very end, you introduce an unexpected twist that entails a complete reinterpretation of all the preceding data, and moreover, it's critical that the new interpretation, though wholly unexpected, makes as much "sense" of the entire set of facts as did the originally "expected" interpretation. In this regard, jokes have much in common with scientific creativity, with what Thomas Kuhn calls a "paradigm shift" in response to a single "anomaly." (It's probably not coincidence that many of the most creative scientists have a great sense of humor.) Of course, the anomaly in the joke is the traditional punch line and the joke is "funny" only if the listener gets the punch line by seeing in a flash of insight how a completely new interpretation of the same set of facts can incorporate the anomalous ending. The longer and more tortuous the garden path of expectation, the "funnier" the punch line when finally delivered.

According to neuroscientist V. S. Ramachandran, the pleasurable “aha!” sensation we feel when we see related objects as a group suggests that the brain’s processes for identifying objects may be intrinsically connected to the reward mechanisms in the limbic system. In other words, joy is the brain’s natural reward for staying alert to correlations and connections in our surroundings.

once the propagation mechanism was in place, it would have exerted selective pressure to make some outliers in the population more innovative. This is because innovations would only be valuable if they spread rapidly. In this respect, we could say mirror neurons served the same role in early hominin evolution as the Internet, Wikipedia, and blogging do today. Once the cascade was set in motion, there was no turning back from the path to humanity.

Humans are apes. So too we are mammals. We are vertebrates. We are pulpy, throbbing colonies of tens of trillions of cells. We are all of these things, but we are not “merely” these things. And we are, in addition to all these things, something unique, something unprecedented, something transcendent. We are something truly new under the sun, with uncharted and perhaps limitless potential. We are the first and only species whose fate has rested in its own hands, and not just in the hands of chemistry and instinct.

This curious effect was noticed as far back as 1892, when textbooks on mental illness noted a link between “religious emotionalism” and epilepsy. It was first clinically described in 1975 by neurologist Norman Geschwind of Boston Veterans Administration Hospital. He noticed that epileptics who had electrical misfirings in their left temporal lobes often had religious experiences, and he speculated that the electrical storm in the brain somehow was the cause of these religious obsessions. Dr. V. S. Ramachandran estimates that 30 to 40 percent of all the temporal lobe epileptics whom he has seen suffer from hyperreligiosity. He notes, “Sometimes it’s a personal God, sometimes it’s a more diffuse feeling of being one with the cosmos. Everything seems suffused with meaning. The patient will say, ‘Finally, I see what it is all really about, Doctor. I really understand God. I understand my place in the universe—the cosmic scheme.’ ” He also notes that many of these individuals are extremely adamant and convincing in their beliefs. He says, “I sometimes wonder whether such patients who have temporal lobe epilepsy have access to another dimension of reality, a wormhole of sorts into a parallel universe. But I usually don’t say this to my colleagues, lest they doubt my sanity.” He has experimented on patients with temporal lobe epilepsy, and confirmed that these individuals had a strong emotional reaction to the word “God” but not to neutral words. This means that the link between hyperreligiosity and temporal lobe epilepsy is real, not just anecdotal. Psychologist Michael Persinger asserts that a certain type of transcranial electrical stimulation (called transcranial magnetic simulation, or TMS) can deliberately induce the effect of these epileptic lesions. If this is so, is it possible that magnetic fields can be used to alter one’s religious beliefs? In Dr. Persinger’s studies, the subject places a helmet on his head (dubbed the “God helmet”), which contains a device that can send magnetism into particular parts of the brain. Afterward, when the subject is interviewed, he will often claim that he was in the presence of some great spirit. David Biello, writing in Scientific American, says, “During the three-minute bursts of stimulation, the affected subjects translated this perception of the divine into their own cultural and religious language—terming it God, Buddha, a benevolent presence, or the wonder of the universe.” Since this effect is reproducible on demand, it indicates that perhaps the brain is hardwired in some way to respond to religious feelings.

Dr. Sperry, after detailed studies of split-brain patients, finally concluded that there could be two distinct minds operating in a single brain. He wrote that each hemisphere is “indeed a conscious system in its own right, perceiving, thinking, remembering, reasoning, willing, and emoting, all at a characteristically human level, and … both the left and right hemisphere may be conscious simultaneously in different, even in mutually conflicting, mental experiences that run along in parallel.” When I interviewed Dr. Michael Gazzaniga of the University of California, Santa Barbara, an authority on split-brain patients, I asked him how experiments can be done to test this theory. There are a variety of ways to communicate separately to each hemisphere without the knowledge of the other hemisphere. One can, for example, have the subject wear special glasses on which questions can be shown to each eye separately, so that directing questions to each hemisphere is easy. The hard part is trying to get an answer from each hemisphere. Since the right brain cannot speak (the speech centers are located only in the left brain), it is difficult to get answers from the right brain. Dr. Gazzaniga told me that to find out what the right brain was thinking, he created an experiment in which the (mute) right brain could “talk” by using Scrabble letters. He began by asking the patient’s left brain what he would do after graduation. The patient replied that he wanted to become a draftsman. But things got interesting when the (mute) right brain was asked the same question. The right brain spelled out the words: “automobile racer.” Unknown to the dominant left brain, the right brain secretly had a completely different agenda for the future. The right brain literally had a mind of its own. Rita Carter writes, “The possible implications of this are mind-boggling. It suggests that we might all be carrying around in our skulls a mute prisoner with a personality, ambition, and self-awareness quite different from the day-to-day entity we believe ourselves to be.” Perhaps there is truth to the oft-heard statement that “inside him, there is someone yearning to be free.” This means that the two hemispheres may even have different beliefs. For example, the neurologist V. S. Ramanchandran describes one split-brain patient who, when asked if he was a believer or not, said he was an atheist, but his right brain declared he was a believer. Apparently, it is possible to have two opposing religious beliefs residing in the same brain. Ramachandran continues: “If that person dies, what happens? Does one hemisphere go to heaven and the other go to hell? I don’t know the answer to that.

Another common form of mental illness is bipolar disorder, in which a person suffers from extreme bouts of wild, delusional optimism, followed by a crash and then periods of deep depression. Bipolar disorder also seems to run in families and, curiously, strikes frequently in artists; perhaps their great works of art were created during bursts of creativity and optimism. A list of creative people who were afflicted by bipolar disorder reads like a Who’s Who of Hollywood celebrities, musicians, artists, and writers. Although the drug lithium seems to control many of the symptoms of bipolar disorder, the causes are not entirely clear. One theory states that bipolar disorder may be caused by an imbalance between the left and right hemispheres. Dr. Michael Sweeney notes, “Brain scans have led researchers to generally assign negative emotions such as sadness to the right hemisphere and positive emotions such as joy to the left hemisphere. For at least a century, neuroscientists have noticed a link between damage to the brain’s left hemisphere and negative moods, including depression and uncontrollable crying. Damage to the right, however, has been associated with a broad array of positive emotions.” So the left hemisphere, which is analytical and controls language, tends to become manic if left to itself. The right hemisphere, on the contrary, is holistic and tends to check this mania. Dr. V. S. Ramachandran writes, “If left unchecked, the left hemisphere would likely render a person delusional or manic.… So it seems reasonable to postulate a ‘devil’s advocate’ in the right hemisphere that allows ‘you’ to adopt a detached, objective (allocentric) view of yourself.” If human consciousness involves simulating the future, it has to compute the outcomes of future events with certain probabilities. It needs, therefore, a delicate balance between optimism and pessimism to estimate the chances of success or failures for certain courses of action. But in some sense, depression is the price we pay for being able to simulate the future. Our consciousness has the ability to conjure up all sorts of horrific outcomes for the future, and is therefore aware of all the bad things that could happen, even if they are not realistic. It is hard to verify many of these theories, since brain scans of people who are clinically depressed indicate that many brain areas are affected. It is difficult to pinpoint the source of the problem, but among the clinically depressed, activity in the parietal and temporal lobes seems to be suppressed, perhaps indicating that the person is withdrawn from the outside world and living in their own internal world. In particular, the ventromedial cortex seems to play an important role. This area apparently creates the feeling that there is a sense of meaning and wholeness to the world, so that everything seems to have a purpose. Overactivity in this area can cause mania, in which people think they are omnipotent. Underactivity in this area is associated with depression and the feeling that life is pointless. So it is possible that a defect in this area may be responsible for some mood swings.

Stephen Jay Gould

Research from Denis Dutton, Brian Boyd, V.S. Ramachandran, William Hirstein and E.O. Wilson, among many others, is clear on the subject: we are enticed by forms, shapes, rhythms and movements that are useful to our existence. We find Vermeer’s “The Girl with the Pearl Earring,” beautiful, for example, because her face is symmetrical, a clue to her strong immune system2. As the neuroscientist Eric Kandel suggests in The Age of Insight, we are fascinated by Gustav Klimt’s Judith because “at a base level, the aesthetics of the image’s luminous gold surface, the soft rendering of the body, and the overall harmonious combination of colors could activate the pleasure circuits, triggering the release of dopamine. If Judith’s smooth skin and exposed breast trigger the release of endorphins, oxytocin, and vasopressin, one might feel sexual excitement.

He emphasized the huge gap between the mental abilities of apes and humans and pointed out (mistakenly) that the human brain had a unique anatomical structure called the ‘hippocampus minor’, which he said was entirely absent in apes.

Later, when I headed off to university, I told my father my heart was set on basic science. Nothing else stimulated my mind half as much. Wise man that he was, he persuaded me to study medicine. “You can become a second-rate doctor and still make a decent living,” he said, “but you can‘t be second-rate scientist; it‘s an oxymoron.

One unexpected hint comes from patients with a strange disorder called anosognosia, a condition in which people seem unaware of or deny their disability. Most patients with a right-hemisphere stroke have complete paralysis of the left side of their body and, as you might expect, complain about it. But about one in twenty of them will vehemently deny their paralysis even though they are mentally otherwise lucid and intelligent. For example, President Woodrow Wilson, whose left side was paralyzed by a stroke in 1919, insisted that he was perfectly fine. Despite the clouding of his thought processes and against all advice, he remained in office, making elaborate travel plans and major decisions pertaining to American involvement in the League of Nations. In 1996 some colleagues and I made our own little investigation of anosognosia and noticed something new and amazing: Some of these patients not only denied their own paralysis, but also denied the paralysis of another patient—and let me assure you, the second patient’s inability to move was as clear as day. Denying one’s own paralysis is odd enough, but why deny another patient’s paralysis? We suggest that this bizarre observation is best understood in terms of damage to Rizzolatti’s mirror neurons. It’s as if anytime you want to make a judgment about someone else’s movements, you have to run a virtual-reality simulation of the corresponding movements in your own brain. And without mirror neurons you cannot do this.

Poets and musicians also seem to enjoy a higher incidence of synesthesia. On his website the psychologist Sean Day provides his translation of a passage from an 1895 German article that quotes the great musician Franz Liszt: When Liszt first began as Kapellmeister in Weimar (1842), it astonished the orchestra that he said: “O please, gentlemen, a little bluer, if you please! This tone type requires it!” Or: “That is a deep violet, please, depend on it! Not so rose!” First the orchestra believed Liszt just joked;…later they got accustomed to the fact that the great musician seemed to see colors there, where there were only tones.

Joining the fray was Bishop Samuel Wilberforce, a staunch creationist who often relied on Owen’s anatomical observations to challenge Darwin’s theory. The battle raged on for twenty years until, tragically, Wilberforce was thrown off a horse and died instantly when his head hit the pavement. It is said that Huxley was sipping his cognac at the Athenaeum in London when the news reached him. He wryly quipped to the reporter, “At long last the Bishop’s brain has come into contact with hard reality, and the result has been fatal.

And the smallest muscle in the body, which is used to abduct the little toe, is the abductor ossis metatarsi digiti quinti minimi. I think it sounds like a poem.

Any joke or humorous incident has the following form. You narrate a story step-by-step, leading your listener along a garden path of expectation, and then you introduce an unexpected twist, a punch line, the comprehension of which requires a complete reinterpretation of the preceding events. But that’s not enough: No scientist whose theoretical edifice is demolished by a single ugly fact entailing a complete overhaul is likely to find it amusing. (Believe me, I’ve tried!) Deflation of expectation is necessary but not sufficient. The extra key ingredient is that the new interpretation must be inconsequential. Let me illustrate. The dean of the medical school starts walking along a path, but before reaching his destination he slips on a banana peel and falls. If his skull is fractured and blood starts gushing out, you rush to his aid and call the ambulance. You don’t laugh. But if he gets up unhurt, wiping the banana off his expensive trousers, you break out into a fit of laughter. It’s called slapstick. The key difference is that in the first case, there is a true alarm requiring urgent attention. In the second case it’s a false alarm, and by laughing you inform your kin in the vicinity not to waste their resources rushing to his aid. It is nature’s “all’s okay” signal.

Spike had the red-green variety. He experienced far fewer colors in the world than most of us do. What was truly bizarre, though, was that he often saw numbers tinged with colors that he had never seen in the real world. He referred to them, quite charmingly and appropriately, as “Martian colors” that were “weird” and seemed quite “unreal.” He could only see these when looking at numbers.

Humphrey had lost his hand in the first Gulf War and now had a phantom hand. As is true in other patients, whenever he was touched on his face, he felt sensations in his missing hand. No surprises so far. But with ideas about mirror neurons brewing in my mind, I decided to try a new experiment. I simply had him watch another person—my student Julie—while I stroked and tapped her hand. Imagine our amazement when he exclaimed with considerable surprise that he could not merely see but actually feel the things being done to Julie’s hand on his phantom. I suggest this happens because his mirror neurons were being activated in the normal fashion but there was no longer a null signal from the hand to veto them. Humphrey’s mirror neuron activity was emerging fully into conscious experience. Imagine: The only thing separating your consciousnesses from another’s might be your skin! After seeing this phenomenon in Humphrey we tested three other patients and found the same effect, which we dubbed “acquired hyperempathy.” Amazingly, it turns out that some of these patients get relief from phantom limb pain by merely watching another person being massaged. This might prove useful clinically because, obviously, you can’t directly massage a phantom.

These surprising results raise another fascinating question. Instead of amputation, what if a patient’s brachial plexus (the nerves connecting the arm to the spinal cord) were to be anesthetized? Would the patient then experience touch sensations in his anesthetized hand when merely watching an accomplice being touched? The surprising answer is yes. This result has radical implications, for it suggests that no major structural reorganization in the brain is required for the hyperempathy effect; merely numbing the arm is adequate. (I did this experiment with my student Laura Case.) Once again, the picture that emerges is a much more dynamic view of brain connections than what you would be led to believe from the static picture implied by textbook diagrams. Sure enough, brains are made up of modules, but the modules are not fixed entities; they are constantly being updated through powerful interactions with each other, with the body, the environment, and indeed with other brains.

The experiments I've discussed so far have helped us understand what is going on in the brains of patients with phantoms and given us hints as to how we might help alleviate their pain. But there is a deeper message here: Your own body is a phantom, one that your brain has temporarily constructed purely for convenience.

When the English arrived in India during Victorian times, they regarded the study of Indian art mainly as ethnography and anthropology. (This would be equivalent to putting Picasso in the anthropology section of the national museum in Delhi.)

Human beings are the only creatures to have true language. Even chimps, who can be trained to sign simple sentences like “Give me fruit,” can’t come close to complex sentences such as “It’s true that Joe is the big alpha male, but he’s starting to get old and lazy, so don’t worry about what he might do unless he seems to be in an especially nasty mood.” The seemingly infinite flexibility and open-endedness of our language is one of the hallmarks of the human species.

Chomsky’s theory of language origins is based on the principle of emergence. The word simply means the whole is greater—sometimes vastly so—than the mere sum of the parts. A good example would be the production of salt—an edible white crystal—by combining the pungent, greenish, poisonous gas chlorine with the shiny, light metal sodium. Neither of these elements has anything saltlike about it, yet they combine into salt. Now if such a complex, wholly unpredictable new property can emerge from a simple interaction between two elementary substances, then who can predict what novel unforeseen properties might emerge when you pack 100 billion nerve cells into the tiny space of the human cranial cavity? Maybe language is one such property.

The late biologist Peter Medawar provides a compelling analogy to illustrate the fallacy. An inherited disorder called phenylketonuria (PKU) is caused by a rarely occurring abnormal gene that results in a failure to metabolize the amino acid phenylalanine in the body. As the amino acid starts accumulating in the child’s brain, he becomes profoundly retarded. The cure is simple. If you diagnose it early enough, all you do is withhold phenylalanine-containing foods from the diet and the child grows up with an entirely normal IQ. Now imagine two boundary conditions. Assume there is a planet where the gene is uncommon and phenylalanine is everywhere, like oxygen or water, and is indispensable for life. On this planet, retardation caused by PKU, and therefore variance in IQ in the population, would be entirely attributable to the PKU gene. Here you would be justified in saying that retardation was a genetic disorder or that IQ was inherited. Now consider another planet in which the converse is true: Everyone has the PKU gene but phenylalanine is rare. On this planet you would say that PKU is an environmental disorder caused by a poison called phenylalanine, and most of the variance in IQ is caused by the environment. This example shows that when the interaction between two variables is labyrinthine it is meaningless to ascribe percentage values to the contribution made by either. And if this is true for just one gene interacting with one environmental variable, the argument must hold with even greater force for something as complex and multifactorial as human intelligence, since genes interact not only with the environment but with each other.

The anthropologist Brent Berlin has pointed out that the Huambisa tribe of northern Peru have over thirty different names for thirty bird species in their jungle and an equal number of fish names for different Amazonian fishes. If you were to jumble up these sixty names and give them to someone from a completely different sociolinguistic background—say, a Chinese peasant—and ask him to classify the names into two groups, one for birds, one for fish, you would find that, astonishingly, he succeeds in this task well above chance level even though his language doesn’t bear the slightest shred of resemblance to the South American one.

As a concrete example, consider the phrase “come hither.” Notice that you gesture this idea by holding your palm up and flexing your fingers toward yourself as if to touch the lower part of the palm. Amazingly, your tongue makes a very similar movement as it curls back to touch the palate to utter “hither” or “here”—examples of synkinesia. “Go” involves pouting the lips outward, whereas “come” involves drawing the lips together inward. (In the Indian Dravidian language Tamil—unrelated to English—the word for go is “po”).

As I said in my BBC Reith Lectures, “Science tells us we are merely beasts, but we don’t feel like that. We feel like angels trapped inside the bodies of beasts, forever craving transcendence.” That’s the essential human predicament in a nutshell.

In Chennai (Madras), there is bronze gallery in the state museum that houses a magnificent collection of southern Indian bronzes. One of its prize works is a twelfth-century Nataraja (Figure 8.5). One day around the turn of the twentieth century, an elderly firangi (“foreigner” or “white” in Hindi) gentleman was observed gazing at the Nataraja in awe. To the amazement of the museum guards and patrons, he went into a sort of trance and proceeded to mimic the dance postures. A crowd gathered around, but the gentleman seemed oblivious until the curator finally showed up to see what was going on. He almost had the poor man arrested until he realized the European was none other than the world-famous sculptor Auguste Rodin. Rodin was moved to tears by The Dancing Shiva. In his writings he referred to it as one of the greatest works of art ever created by the human mind.

apotemnophilia, a curious disorder in which a completely normal individual has an intense and ever-present desire to amputate an arm or a leg. (“Apotemnophila” derives from the Greek: apo, “away from” temnein, “to cut” and philia, “emotional attachment to.”) He may describe his body as being “overcomplete” or his arm as being “intrusive.” You get the feeling that the subject is trying to convey something ineffable. For instance he might say, “It’s not as if I feel it doesn’t belong to me, Doctor. On the contrary, it feels like it’s too present.” More than half the patients go on to actually have the limb removed.

my lab conducted a brain-scanning study on four patients with apotemnophilia and compared the results with four normal control subjects. In the controls, touching any part of the body activated right SPL. In all four patients, touching the part of the limb each one wanted removed evoked no activity in the SPL—the brain’s map of the body didn’t light up, so to speak, on the scans.

Charles Darwin himself was at times ambivalent about these issues: I feel most deeply that this whole question of Creation is too profound for human intellect. A dog might as well speculate on the mind of Newton! Let each man hope and believe what he can.

If the left prefrontal lobe is damaged, the patient may withdraw from the social world and show a marked reluctance to do anything at all. This is euphemistically called pseudodepression—“pseudo” because none of the standard criteria for identifying depression, such as feelings of bleakness and chronic negative thought patterns, are revealed by psychological or neurological probing. Conversely, if the right prefrontal lobe is damaged, a patient will seem euphoric even though, once again he really won’t be. Cases of prefrontal damage are especially distressing to relatives. Such a patient seems to lose all interest in his own future and he shows no moral compunctions of any kind. He may laugh at a funeral or urinate in public. The great paradox is that he seems normal in most respects: his language, his memory, and even his IQ are unaffected. Yet he has lost many of the most quintessential attributes that define human nature: ambition, empathy, foresight, a complex personality, a sense of morality, and a sense of dignity as a human being. For these reasons the prefrontal cortex has long been regarded as the “seat of humanity.” As for the question of how such a relatively small patch of the brain manages to orchestrate such a sophisticated and elusive suite of functions, we are still very much at a loss.

ancestors, perhaps as friends, perhaps as foes—we do not know. Nor again do we know why they vanished, although given our species’ dismal record as responsible stewards of nature, it’s a decent bet that we drove them to extinction.

(One theory holds that the CIA has spotted them already but the information is being withheld until it is ruled out that they are hoarding weapons of mass destruction like blowpipes.)

TWO TOPICS IN brain research always seem to attract geniuses and crackpots. One is consciousness and the other is the question of how language evolved.

Activity in a region of the brain called the postcentral gyrus correlates with conscious experiences of touch. The neurosurgeon Wilder Penfield reported in 1937 that stimulating this gyrus with an electrode in the left hemisphere prompted his patients to report conscious experiences of touch on the right side of the body; stimulating the right hemisphere led to feelings of touch on the left side of the body.13 The correlation is systematic: nearby points on the gyrus correspond to nearby points on the body, and regions of the body that are more sensitive, such as the lips and fingertips, occupy more real estate on the gyrus. Stimulate the gyrus near the middle of the brain, and you feel it in your toes. Slide the electrode along the gyrus, stimulating at ever more lateral points, and the feeling, with a few exceptions, slides systematically up the body. The exceptions are interesting. The face, for instance, resides next to the hand on the gyrus. The toes are next to the genitals—a fact perhaps relevant to foot fetishes, as V. S. Ramachandran has suggested.14