Phantoms in the Brain
A book has got me hooked right now... "Phantoms in the Brain" by V.S. Ramachandran.
I don't know quite what to say about it... except that it drives home deep points about who we are and how we are shaped by our brain activity and structure. He looks at what we'd call strange cases, from phantom limb, to paralized patients who can't seem to realize that they are paralized (agnosagnosia), to individuals who don't pay attention to the left side of objects (left hemi-neglect) and now the relationship between temporal lobe epilepsy and religious experience.
I suppose the general theme that impresses me most is how these patients are so completely fooled by the damage to their brains, and at the same time Dr. Ramachandran shows how what is going on in their heads is really just the same stuff that happens with all of us, just with disfuctional results. Pardon the analogy, my daughter really likes Thomas the Tank Engine. But I'm reminded of the episode where Gordon (the express engine) is bragging that he always knows the way to go, as if by instinct. Then, inevititibly, the switches are set wrong and he goes the wrong way. That's us really, faces strapped onto machines. We go where the rails take us and so long as we stay on the right track we think we're in control. The cases in Dr. Ramachandran's book are generally dramatic, resulting from accidents or strokes. What is remarkable is the way the sense of self can just keep right on going, unaware of the disfunction, like a toy train off the rails with its wheels still chuffing along. But in our every day life we are still just the result of these mechanisms. We have a bad day and search for why we're upset, but the truth may very well be that we were upset because of some fluke of brain chemistry and the search for a reason may just be that mechanism of self inventing a story.
I don't know quite what to say about it... except that it drives home deep points about who we are and how we are shaped by our brain activity and structure. He looks at what we'd call strange cases, from phantom limb, to paralized patients who can't seem to realize that they are paralized (agnosagnosia), to individuals who don't pay attention to the left side of objects (left hemi-neglect) and now the relationship between temporal lobe epilepsy and religious experience.
I suppose the general theme that impresses me most is how these patients are so completely fooled by the damage to their brains, and at the same time Dr. Ramachandran shows how what is going on in their heads is really just the same stuff that happens with all of us, just with disfuctional results. Pardon the analogy, my daughter really likes Thomas the Tank Engine. But I'm reminded of the episode where Gordon (the express engine) is bragging that he always knows the way to go, as if by instinct. Then, inevititibly, the switches are set wrong and he goes the wrong way. That's us really, faces strapped onto machines. We go where the rails take us and so long as we stay on the right track we think we're in control. The cases in Dr. Ramachandran's book are generally dramatic, resulting from accidents or strokes. What is remarkable is the way the sense of self can just keep right on going, unaware of the disfunction, like a toy train off the rails with its wheels still chuffing along. But in our every day life we are still just the result of these mechanisms. We have a bad day and search for why we're upset, but the truth may very well be that we were upset because of some fluke of brain chemistry and the search for a reason may just be that mechanism of self inventing a story.