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cameliarose's review against another edition
4.0
Very informative book. The author covered many different topics in neuroscience, all in his opinion related to human race's "uniqueness". However, I wish he had a better focus. Each chapter could have been turned into a book or multiple books. I wish he had informed us whether the patients mentioned in the book had been "cured"!
neven's review against another edition
4.0
Breezy, fun, and very insightful tour of new discoveries in neurology, with an Oliver Sacks-ian focus on interesting neurological disorders, and on mirror neurons. Ramachandran writes (and thinks) in an affable, optimistic, folksy way. This would sound annoying in a pure pop-science writer, but Ramachandran is an experienced researcher, and his examples and explanations have that quality of instant clarification. In a single throwaway remark, he can open a very wide door of interest. (Would watching a horror movie stop a panic attack? Are puns the opposite of metaphors?)
One slightly unfortunate side effect of his casual, playful tone is that he often reaches for humor—which is fine in itself, but his jokes are quite bad. They're grade-A uncle-joke material, corny and slightly inappropriate in a way that makes you want to go "yeeeah we don't say that anymore". Ramachandran isn't quite as caring and sensitive as Sacks in his attitude toward his patients, but he seems sensitive enough that I'm sure he's a nice dude. I just wish he'd lay off the wonky jokes.
Another slightly problematic area is his attempt at analysis of the building blocks of art and art appreciation. He ties them to basic aspects of visual processing: symmetry, contrast, etc. and some higher-level stuff (metaphor). This is all fine, and I'm in agreement; however, he stops a bit short, only noting in passing other qualities of art (such as ego and social effects). This is partly due to a focus on visual art; true, we humans are visual creatures, but not exclusively so. It could be neat if Ramachandran approached music and literature with the same neurologically-minded mind. Like 'Musicophilia', but a bit more academically strict.
It's a very fun book to power through, and I'm looking forward to more.
One slightly unfortunate side effect of his casual, playful tone is that he often reaches for humor—which is fine in itself, but his jokes are quite bad. They're grade-A uncle-joke material, corny and slightly inappropriate in a way that makes you want to go "yeeeah we don't say that anymore". Ramachandran isn't quite as caring and sensitive as Sacks in his attitude toward his patients, but he seems sensitive enough that I'm sure he's a nice dude. I just wish he'd lay off the wonky jokes.
Another slightly problematic area is his attempt at analysis of the building blocks of art and art appreciation. He ties them to basic aspects of visual processing: symmetry, contrast, etc. and some higher-level stuff (metaphor). This is all fine, and I'm in agreement; however, he stops a bit short, only noting in passing other qualities of art (such as ego and social effects). This is partly due to a focus on visual art; true, we humans are visual creatures, but not exclusively so. It could be neat if Ramachandran approached music and literature with the same neurologically-minded mind. Like 'Musicophilia', but a bit more academically strict.
It's a very fun book to power through, and I'm looking forward to more.
icywaterfall's review against another edition
4.0
There are a few themes that run through the book; humans are truly unique and special even though we have evolved from a common ancestor with every other creature in the world. This book is Rama’s modest contribution to try and crack the code of the human brain.
- 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. Unlike Darwin, Richard Owen (Victorian naturalist) was more impressed by the differences between us and apes, rather than the similarities. The view that we are special is now only held by religious zealots; but the human brain is indeed unique and distinct from that of the ape by a huge gap, EVEN IF it’s an evolved piece of machinery. Where does our uniqueness come from? A common fallacy is to assume that gradual small changes engender small gradual incremental results. But phase transitions do occur in nature; frozen water turning to liquid water, speculative bubbles, etc. Phase transitions may explain the explosion of human intelligence that started some 150 thousand years ago. What were the structural brain improvements that were key? That is what this book is about. But first, a brief survey of brain anatomy.
- PHANTOM LIMBS; touching the face of an amputee patient can evoke sensations in different parts of the phantom; but why? When an arm is amputated, there is no longer an arm, but there is still a map of the arm in the brain. The orphaned brain map of the hand continues to represent the missing arm and hand in absentia, but it is not receiving any actual inputs so it invades the territory of the face and uses the inputs of facial touches to represent the hand. Even in adulthood, the brain retains some level of plasticity. Second experiment: many patients have a vivid sense of being able to move their missing limbs; feelings that are coming from the motor command centres in the brain. Motor output signals to the muscles are cc’ed to the parietal lobes where they are compared to feedback signals from the eyes. If the arm is amputated, the motor command center doesn’t know that arm is gone, so it continues to send motor commands to the arm. However, if the arm is gone, the eyes cannot provide a reality check; so you experience actual movement sensations. The opposite can occur, where patients report that their phantom limbs are frozen. This is because, prior to amputation, these patients had real paralysis of their arms. Because experience modifies the brain by strengthening the synapses that link neurons. If A and B stop having any apparent relationship, the neurons that represent A and B will shut down their mutual connections. When the arm was there, the brain learned the paralysis, and continued to represent this paralysis where the patient’s body image was constructed even after the arm was severed. How can you reverse this learning? If you place your good arm facing a mirror (such that a patient now thinks that his good arm is where his phantom arm is) then you can undo what the brain had previously learned. This relieved the sense that the phantom limb was paralysed, and got rid of the pain. The old view was that the brain consists of many specialised modules that are hardwired from birth to perform specific jobs; but the brain’s modules don’t do their jobs in isolation; there is a great deal of back-and-forth between them. To a surprising extent, one module can even take over the functions of another. We can now say with confidence that the brain is an extraordinarily plastic biological system that is in a state of dynamic equilibrium with the external world. Is lifelong plasticity distinctly human? No; so what does it tell us about our uniqueness? Lifelong plasticity is one of the central players in the evolution of human uniqueness. While other animal brains exhibit plasticity, we are the only species to use it as a central player in brain evolution.
- SEEING AND KNOWING: Vision is not unique to humans; but since human brains are special and vision occurs in the brain, we can also say that human vision is special. Our perception of the world ordinarily seems so effortless; but even though our picture of the world seems coherent and unified, it actually emerges from the activity of thirty different visual areas in the cortex, each of which mediates multiple subtle functions. In order to understand perception, you need to get rid of the idea that the image at the back of your eye is displayed on a screen in the head; instead, as soon as the rays of light are converted into neural impulses, it no longer makes any sense to think of the visual information as being an image. We must think, instead, of symbolic descriptions that represent the scenes and obejcts that had been in the image. The brain represents the scenes in front of us in its own alphabet of neural impulses. What you see can’t just be the image on the retina because the retinal image can remain constant (Necker cube) but your perception can change radically. We are faced with a ‘black box’ when it comes to solving perceptual psychology conundrums. A large chunk of the human brain is devoted to vision; there are many more fibres coming back from each stage of processing to an earlier stage as there are fibres going forward from each area into the next area ‘higher up’. We don’t know why we higher primates have a large number of visual areas but they are all specialised for different aspects of vision (colour, movement, shapes, faces, etc.) Patients who have a damaged middle temporal area cannot see movement; which seems to suggest that this area is concerned with detecting movement. Likewise, there is an area called V4 in the temporal lobe that appears to be specialised for processing colour. The rest are not so compartmentalised. But beneath all the bewildering anatomical complexity there is a simple organisational pattern that is helpful in the study of vision. There are two pathways by which visual information enters the cortex. The old pathway starts in the retinas, and is concerned with spatial aspects of vision: where, but not what, an object is. The new pathway allows sophisticated analysis and recognition of complex visual scenes and objects. The new splits into two subpathways: pathway 1 (the how stream) and pathway 2 (the what stream). The how stream is concerned with the relationships among visual objects in space, while the what stream is concerned with the relationships of features within visual objects themselves. The what stream is concerned mainly with recognising what an object is and what it means to you; it goes to the fusiform gyrus (which discriminates Ps from Qs) and then (once meaning is extracted, from whatever it is you are looking at), the messages travel to the amygdala to evoke feelings about what you are seeing. If it’s important, you instantly feel something; if it’s intense, the signals from the amygdala also cascade into your hypothalamus, which orchestrates your hormones and activates your autonomic nervous system to prepare for fighting, fleeing, feeding, or fucking. Capgras Delusion is when the emotional aspects of whatever you are looking at do not register (perhaps the pathways between what the image is and the appropriate emotional response are severed) and so the patient confabulates a plausible story to account for what he feels. If he looks at his mother, with recognition but no warmth, he’ll plausibly confabulate that she is a very convincing imposter.
- MIRROR NEURONS: Mirror neurons may have played a pivotal role in developing culture: culture consists of massive collections of complex skills and knowledge which are transferred from person to person through language and imitation. Mirror neurons were discovered by Rizzolatti; they are nature’s own virtual-reality simulations of the intentions of other beings. In humans alone they are the sophisticated enough to interpret complex intention. With the abilities to read someone’s intentions and mimic their vocalisations are in place; language can develop. What do mirror neurons actually do? They allow you to figure out someone’s intentions, and may have evolved further to enable us to adopt the other person’s conceptual vantage point, which means you can see yourself as others see you; self-awareness. Mirror neurons also allow us to imitate others; miming may have been the key step in hominin evolution, resulting in our ability to transmit knowledge through example: mirror neurons may be how humans made the transition from gene-based Darwinian evolution to cultural evolution. This may answer the dilemma of the ‘great leap forward’, how several uniquely human traits emerged ‘suddenly’. There was a genetic change in the brain that freed us from genetics by enhancing our ability to learn from one another. The increased sophistication of a single mechanism (imitation and intention reading) can explain the huge behavioural gaps between us and apes. Mirror neurons are not sufficient; they just payed a crucial role in developing culture.
- THE EVOLUTION OF LANGUAGE: A patient had Broca’s aphasia; he could convey the general sense of what he was trying to say, but his speech was devoid of syntax (grammatical structure). The evidence from aphasics suggests that the brain has neural circuits specialised for language. Language does not come from a single area in the brain, as it relies on numerous quasi-independent areas that deal with words (lexicon), meaning (semantics), and grammar (syntax). Broca’s area is mainly concerned with syntax; Wernicke’s area is mainly concerned with semantic. There are many questions to ask: How autonomous are these areas? Does language enable us to think, or does thinking enable us to talk? And how did this system originate? There must have been a transitional phase of intermediate linguistic complexity that had to have been at least partially functional. What was this bridge? First, language is not communication; language has several features that sets it apart from mere communication. Our vocabulary is enormous; we can use words to refer to things not visible, hypothetically, in the past, future; only humans can use metaphor and analogy; and flexible recursive syntax is found only in human language. There are four main ideas of how language could have developped:
(i) God gave us language,
(ii) Language is based on the principle of emergence,
(iii) Thinking evolved first and set the stage for language, OR
(iv) Language is an instinct; a highly specialised brain mechanism unique to humans.
Rama argues that language and many aspects of abstract thought evolved through exaptations whose fortuitous combination yielded novel solutions. This is called the synesthetic bootstrapping theory. Words are not hardwired into the brain; but the competence to acquire the rules is innate, although exposure is still needed to pick up the actual rules. this competence is bestowed by a Language Acquisition Device (LAD); Apes lack an LAD and humans have this genetic component. The question isn’t nature vs nurture, but how do nature and nurture interact to create the final product of language? How did the ability to acquire language so quickly evolve? There is a built-in, non-arbitrary correspondence between the visual shape of an object and the sound, (Bouba-Kiki effect.) This might be how words came to ‘stand-in’ for certain obejcts. Just as there is a nonarbitrary correspondence and cross-activation between brain maps for sights and sounds, perhaps there is a similar correspondence between visual and auditory maps, on the one hand, and motor maps on the other. Once these correspondence maps wielded the full repertoire of words used in daily life, the words themselves were blended beyond recognition; but the synesthetic bootstrapping theory sowed the initial seeds of lexicon, helping to form the original vocabulary base on which subsequent linguistic elaboration was built. The bouba-kiki effect may have fuelled the emergence of proto-words and a rudimentary lexicon. But how did semantics evolve? What is meaning? We have no idea how neural circuitry embodies meaning; but if you allow that abstraction is an important step in the genesis of meaning, then bouba-kiki may provide a clue. The sound kiki and the jagged drawing seem to have nothing in common; but the brain has no problem in abstracting the property of jaggedness from both signals. The angular gyrus is involved in this cross-modal abstraction. This area evolved originally for cross-modal abstraction, but an exaltation then developed whereby each gyrus (we have two; one in each hemisphere) evolved different styles of abstraction. The right angular gyrus for visuospatial and body-based metaphors and abstraction, and the left for more language based metaphors. In the angular gyrus the very same computational ability set the state for other types of abstraction: the ability to extract the common denominators among superficially dissimilar entities. Now, how did syntax evolve? One intriguing possibility is that the hierarchical tree structure of syntax may have evolved from a more primitive neural circuit that was already in place for tool use; the wielding of a composite structure bears a tantalising resemblance to the embedding of, say, a noun phrase within a longer sentence. It’s entirely possible that the brain mechanism that implemented the hierarchical subassembly strategy in tool use became cooped for a totally novel function, the syntactic tree structure. He suggests that an area close to Broca’s area originally evolved in tandem with the Inferior parietal lobe for the hierarchical subassembly routines for tool use. This area split off to then become Broca’s area.
- WHAT IS THE SELF?: Very early in evolution the brain developed the ability to create first-order representations of external objects that could elicit only a very limited number of reactions. But as the human brain evolved further, there emerged a second brain that creates metarepresentations by processing the information from the first brain into manageable chunks that can be used for a wider repertoire of more sophisticated responses, including language and symbolic thought. The second brain imbues an object with meaning, creating a metarepresentational that lows you to be consciously aware of a cat in a way that the rat isn’t. Is a person still a person if he can be broken down into fragments? A variety of neurological conditions show us that the self is not the monolithic entity it believe itself to be. What the neurology tells us is that the self consists of many components, and the notion of one unitary self may well be an illusion. Might Freud have been right: could most of what constitutes our ‘self’ be unconscious, uncontrollable, and unknowable? The conscious self is not a concentrated essence that inhabits a special throne at the center of the neural labyrinth, but neither is it a property of the whole brain. Instead, the self seems to emerge from a relatively small cluster of brain areas that are linked into an amazingly powerful network. Only some parts of the brain are conscious; knowing which parts are conscious and what they are doing is the first step towards understanding consciousness. Someone with blindsight, for example, has damage to his visual cortex and experiences none of the qualities associated with vision; yet can still see. Why this discrepancy between conscious and unconscious brain computation? By studying patients who have disturbances in self-representation, we can better understand how a self arises in the normal human brain. Let’s first define our intuitions about the self which work together too hold up what we call the self:
Unity: you feel like one person. But what if the self is produced not by a single entity but by the push and pull of multiple forces of which we are unconscious? The two hemispheres have different, but complementary, coping styles in dealing with the world. Anosognosia is the denial of paralysis. What is the evolutionary function of these hemispheric differences? Information arriving through the senses is ordinarily merged with preexisting memories to create a belief system about yourself and the world. If there is a small piece of anomalous information that doesn’t fit your ‘big picture’ belief system, the left hemisphere tries to smooth over the discrepancies and anomalies in order to preserve the coherence of self and the astability of behaviour. The left hemisphere sometimes even fabricates information to preserve harmony and overall view of itself. But there is a limit, imposed by the right hemisphere that allows you to adopt a detached view of yourself. When it comes to hemiplegia (complete paralysis of one side of the body), if the right-hemisphere is damaged, the left-hemisphere fabricator can go to extreme and absurd lengths to deny paralysis. Belief is not a single thing; it has many layers that can be peeled away one at a time until the ‘true’ self becomes nothing more than an airy abstraction.
Continuity: you feel a sense of continuity through time.
Embodiment: you feel anchored and at home in your body. Apotemnophilia is the disorder in which a normal individual has an intense desire to amputate an arm or leg. How do we explain this? If a particular body part such as an arm or a leg failed to be represented in this hardwired scaffolding of your body image, the result would be a sense of revulsion toward it. The lack of coherence between the outputs of brain modules can create alienation, discomfort, delusion, or paranoia. The brain abhors internal anomalies and will often go to absurd lengths to deny them or explain them away.
Privacy: your qualities and mental life are your own, alone. Although mirror neurons allow you to tentatively adopt another person’s vantage point, they don’t result in an out of body experience; this is because your frontal lobes inhibit the activated mirror neurons enough to stop you having an out of body experience. However, disturbance in this system lead to a dissolution of interpersonal boundaries, personal identity, and body image.
Social Embedding: the self maintains an arrogant sense of privacy and autonomy that belies how closely it is linked to other brains. To most of us with undamaged brains, it seems counterintuitive that identity (facts about a person) should be segregated from familiarity (emotional reactions to a person). But in Capgras syndrome (identity but no familiarity), and prosopagnosia (familiarity but no identity) we realise that there are different brain areas mediating different aspects of people.
Free will: you feel like you can consciously choose between alternatives.
Self-awareness: you are aware of the fact that you are a self. But there are some disorders that can nevertheless distort your self-awareness. Cotard’s syndrome is the condition where the patient thinks he’s dead; this is a form extreme and general form of Capgras syndrome. For a Cotard’s patient, the entire sensory world would evoke no emotional reaction; and it would seem to the patient as though he were in a dream. If the extreme opposite were to happen (extreme overactivation of emotional reaction to the world), the result would be an extreme heightening of empathy for others, self, the world, and it would feel like union with God.
- CONCLUSION: One of the major themes of the book has been the question of how your inner self interacts with the world while maintaining its privacy. When informed that their conscious self emerges ‘simply’ from mindless agitations of atoms and molecules in their brains, people feel let down, but they shouldn’t. The basic constituents of matter are themselves deeply mysterious with properties bordering on the metaphysical; so we need not fear that the self might be any less wonderful or awe inspiring for being made of atoms.
- 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. Unlike Darwin, Richard Owen (Victorian naturalist) was more impressed by the differences between us and apes, rather than the similarities. The view that we are special is now only held by religious zealots; but the human brain is indeed unique and distinct from that of the ape by a huge gap, EVEN IF it’s an evolved piece of machinery. Where does our uniqueness come from? A common fallacy is to assume that gradual small changes engender small gradual incremental results. But phase transitions do occur in nature; frozen water turning to liquid water, speculative bubbles, etc. Phase transitions may explain the explosion of human intelligence that started some 150 thousand years ago. What were the structural brain improvements that were key? That is what this book is about. But first, a brief survey of brain anatomy.
- PHANTOM LIMBS; touching the face of an amputee patient can evoke sensations in different parts of the phantom; but why? When an arm is amputated, there is no longer an arm, but there is still a map of the arm in the brain. The orphaned brain map of the hand continues to represent the missing arm and hand in absentia, but it is not receiving any actual inputs so it invades the territory of the face and uses the inputs of facial touches to represent the hand. Even in adulthood, the brain retains some level of plasticity. Second experiment: many patients have a vivid sense of being able to move their missing limbs; feelings that are coming from the motor command centres in the brain. Motor output signals to the muscles are cc’ed to the parietal lobes where they are compared to feedback signals from the eyes. If the arm is amputated, the motor command center doesn’t know that arm is gone, so it continues to send motor commands to the arm. However, if the arm is gone, the eyes cannot provide a reality check; so you experience actual movement sensations. The opposite can occur, where patients report that their phantom limbs are frozen. This is because, prior to amputation, these patients had real paralysis of their arms. Because experience modifies the brain by strengthening the synapses that link neurons. If A and B stop having any apparent relationship, the neurons that represent A and B will shut down their mutual connections. When the arm was there, the brain learned the paralysis, and continued to represent this paralysis where the patient’s body image was constructed even after the arm was severed. How can you reverse this learning? If you place your good arm facing a mirror (such that a patient now thinks that his good arm is where his phantom arm is) then you can undo what the brain had previously learned. This relieved the sense that the phantom limb was paralysed, and got rid of the pain. The old view was that the brain consists of many specialised modules that are hardwired from birth to perform specific jobs; but the brain’s modules don’t do their jobs in isolation; there is a great deal of back-and-forth between them. To a surprising extent, one module can even take over the functions of another. We can now say with confidence that the brain is an extraordinarily plastic biological system that is in a state of dynamic equilibrium with the external world. Is lifelong plasticity distinctly human? No; so what does it tell us about our uniqueness? Lifelong plasticity is one of the central players in the evolution of human uniqueness. While other animal brains exhibit plasticity, we are the only species to use it as a central player in brain evolution.
- SEEING AND KNOWING: Vision is not unique to humans; but since human brains are special and vision occurs in the brain, we can also say that human vision is special. Our perception of the world ordinarily seems so effortless; but even though our picture of the world seems coherent and unified, it actually emerges from the activity of thirty different visual areas in the cortex, each of which mediates multiple subtle functions. In order to understand perception, you need to get rid of the idea that the image at the back of your eye is displayed on a screen in the head; instead, as soon as the rays of light are converted into neural impulses, it no longer makes any sense to think of the visual information as being an image. We must think, instead, of symbolic descriptions that represent the scenes and obejcts that had been in the image. The brain represents the scenes in front of us in its own alphabet of neural impulses. What you see can’t just be the image on the retina because the retinal image can remain constant (Necker cube) but your perception can change radically. We are faced with a ‘black box’ when it comes to solving perceptual psychology conundrums. A large chunk of the human brain is devoted to vision; there are many more fibres coming back from each stage of processing to an earlier stage as there are fibres going forward from each area into the next area ‘higher up’. We don’t know why we higher primates have a large number of visual areas but they are all specialised for different aspects of vision (colour, movement, shapes, faces, etc.) Patients who have a damaged middle temporal area cannot see movement; which seems to suggest that this area is concerned with detecting movement. Likewise, there is an area called V4 in the temporal lobe that appears to be specialised for processing colour. The rest are not so compartmentalised. But beneath all the bewildering anatomical complexity there is a simple organisational pattern that is helpful in the study of vision. There are two pathways by which visual information enters the cortex. The old pathway starts in the retinas, and is concerned with spatial aspects of vision: where, but not what, an object is. The new pathway allows sophisticated analysis and recognition of complex visual scenes and objects. The new splits into two subpathways: pathway 1 (the how stream) and pathway 2 (the what stream). The how stream is concerned with the relationships among visual objects in space, while the what stream is concerned with the relationships of features within visual objects themselves. The what stream is concerned mainly with recognising what an object is and what it means to you; it goes to the fusiform gyrus (which discriminates Ps from Qs) and then (once meaning is extracted, from whatever it is you are looking at), the messages travel to the amygdala to evoke feelings about what you are seeing. If it’s important, you instantly feel something; if it’s intense, the signals from the amygdala also cascade into your hypothalamus, which orchestrates your hormones and activates your autonomic nervous system to prepare for fighting, fleeing, feeding, or fucking. Capgras Delusion is when the emotional aspects of whatever you are looking at do not register (perhaps the pathways between what the image is and the appropriate emotional response are severed) and so the patient confabulates a plausible story to account for what he feels. If he looks at his mother, with recognition but no warmth, he’ll plausibly confabulate that she is a very convincing imposter.
- MIRROR NEURONS: Mirror neurons may have played a pivotal role in developing culture: culture consists of massive collections of complex skills and knowledge which are transferred from person to person through language and imitation. Mirror neurons were discovered by Rizzolatti; they are nature’s own virtual-reality simulations of the intentions of other beings. In humans alone they are the sophisticated enough to interpret complex intention. With the abilities to read someone’s intentions and mimic their vocalisations are in place; language can develop. What do mirror neurons actually do? They allow you to figure out someone’s intentions, and may have evolved further to enable us to adopt the other person’s conceptual vantage point, which means you can see yourself as others see you; self-awareness. Mirror neurons also allow us to imitate others; miming may have been the key step in hominin evolution, resulting in our ability to transmit knowledge through example: mirror neurons may be how humans made the transition from gene-based Darwinian evolution to cultural evolution. This may answer the dilemma of the ‘great leap forward’, how several uniquely human traits emerged ‘suddenly’. There was a genetic change in the brain that freed us from genetics by enhancing our ability to learn from one another. The increased sophistication of a single mechanism (imitation and intention reading) can explain the huge behavioural gaps between us and apes. Mirror neurons are not sufficient; they just payed a crucial role in developing culture.
- THE EVOLUTION OF LANGUAGE: A patient had Broca’s aphasia; he could convey the general sense of what he was trying to say, but his speech was devoid of syntax (grammatical structure). The evidence from aphasics suggests that the brain has neural circuits specialised for language. Language does not come from a single area in the brain, as it relies on numerous quasi-independent areas that deal with words (lexicon), meaning (semantics), and grammar (syntax). Broca’s area is mainly concerned with syntax; Wernicke’s area is mainly concerned with semantic. There are many questions to ask: How autonomous are these areas? Does language enable us to think, or does thinking enable us to talk? And how did this system originate? There must have been a transitional phase of intermediate linguistic complexity that had to have been at least partially functional. What was this bridge? First, language is not communication; language has several features that sets it apart from mere communication. Our vocabulary is enormous; we can use words to refer to things not visible, hypothetically, in the past, future; only humans can use metaphor and analogy; and flexible recursive syntax is found only in human language. There are four main ideas of how language could have developped:
(i) God gave us language,
(ii) Language is based on the principle of emergence,
(iii) Thinking evolved first and set the stage for language, OR
(iv) Language is an instinct; a highly specialised brain mechanism unique to humans.
Rama argues that language and many aspects of abstract thought evolved through exaptations whose fortuitous combination yielded novel solutions. This is called the synesthetic bootstrapping theory. Words are not hardwired into the brain; but the competence to acquire the rules is innate, although exposure is still needed to pick up the actual rules. this competence is bestowed by a Language Acquisition Device (LAD); Apes lack an LAD and humans have this genetic component. The question isn’t nature vs nurture, but how do nature and nurture interact to create the final product of language? How did the ability to acquire language so quickly evolve? There is a built-in, non-arbitrary correspondence between the visual shape of an object and the sound, (Bouba-Kiki effect.) This might be how words came to ‘stand-in’ for certain obejcts. Just as there is a nonarbitrary correspondence and cross-activation between brain maps for sights and sounds, perhaps there is a similar correspondence between visual and auditory maps, on the one hand, and motor maps on the other. Once these correspondence maps wielded the full repertoire of words used in daily life, the words themselves were blended beyond recognition; but the synesthetic bootstrapping theory sowed the initial seeds of lexicon, helping to form the original vocabulary base on which subsequent linguistic elaboration was built. The bouba-kiki effect may have fuelled the emergence of proto-words and a rudimentary lexicon. But how did semantics evolve? What is meaning? We have no idea how neural circuitry embodies meaning; but if you allow that abstraction is an important step in the genesis of meaning, then bouba-kiki may provide a clue. The sound kiki and the jagged drawing seem to have nothing in common; but the brain has no problem in abstracting the property of jaggedness from both signals. The angular gyrus is involved in this cross-modal abstraction. This area evolved originally for cross-modal abstraction, but an exaltation then developed whereby each gyrus (we have two; one in each hemisphere) evolved different styles of abstraction. The right angular gyrus for visuospatial and body-based metaphors and abstraction, and the left for more language based metaphors. In the angular gyrus the very same computational ability set the state for other types of abstraction: the ability to extract the common denominators among superficially dissimilar entities. Now, how did syntax evolve? One intriguing possibility is that the hierarchical tree structure of syntax may have evolved from a more primitive neural circuit that was already in place for tool use; the wielding of a composite structure bears a tantalising resemblance to the embedding of, say, a noun phrase within a longer sentence. It’s entirely possible that the brain mechanism that implemented the hierarchical subassembly strategy in tool use became cooped for a totally novel function, the syntactic tree structure. He suggests that an area close to Broca’s area originally evolved in tandem with the Inferior parietal lobe for the hierarchical subassembly routines for tool use. This area split off to then become Broca’s area.
- WHAT IS THE SELF?: Very early in evolution the brain developed the ability to create first-order representations of external objects that could elicit only a very limited number of reactions. But as the human brain evolved further, there emerged a second brain that creates metarepresentations by processing the information from the first brain into manageable chunks that can be used for a wider repertoire of more sophisticated responses, including language and symbolic thought. The second brain imbues an object with meaning, creating a metarepresentational that lows you to be consciously aware of a cat in a way that the rat isn’t. Is a person still a person if he can be broken down into fragments? A variety of neurological conditions show us that the self is not the monolithic entity it believe itself to be. What the neurology tells us is that the self consists of many components, and the notion of one unitary self may well be an illusion. Might Freud have been right: could most of what constitutes our ‘self’ be unconscious, uncontrollable, and unknowable? The conscious self is not a concentrated essence that inhabits a special throne at the center of the neural labyrinth, but neither is it a property of the whole brain. Instead, the self seems to emerge from a relatively small cluster of brain areas that are linked into an amazingly powerful network. Only some parts of the brain are conscious; knowing which parts are conscious and what they are doing is the first step towards understanding consciousness. Someone with blindsight, for example, has damage to his visual cortex and experiences none of the qualities associated with vision; yet can still see. Why this discrepancy between conscious and unconscious brain computation? By studying patients who have disturbances in self-representation, we can better understand how a self arises in the normal human brain. Let’s first define our intuitions about the self which work together too hold up what we call the self:
Unity: you feel like one person. But what if the self is produced not by a single entity but by the push and pull of multiple forces of which we are unconscious? The two hemispheres have different, but complementary, coping styles in dealing with the world. Anosognosia is the denial of paralysis. What is the evolutionary function of these hemispheric differences? Information arriving through the senses is ordinarily merged with preexisting memories to create a belief system about yourself and the world. If there is a small piece of anomalous information that doesn’t fit your ‘big picture’ belief system, the left hemisphere tries to smooth over the discrepancies and anomalies in order to preserve the coherence of self and the astability of behaviour. The left hemisphere sometimes even fabricates information to preserve harmony and overall view of itself. But there is a limit, imposed by the right hemisphere that allows you to adopt a detached view of yourself. When it comes to hemiplegia (complete paralysis of one side of the body), if the right-hemisphere is damaged, the left-hemisphere fabricator can go to extreme and absurd lengths to deny paralysis. Belief is not a single thing; it has many layers that can be peeled away one at a time until the ‘true’ self becomes nothing more than an airy abstraction.
Continuity: you feel a sense of continuity through time.
Embodiment: you feel anchored and at home in your body. Apotemnophilia is the disorder in which a normal individual has an intense desire to amputate an arm or leg. How do we explain this? If a particular body part such as an arm or a leg failed to be represented in this hardwired scaffolding of your body image, the result would be a sense of revulsion toward it. The lack of coherence between the outputs of brain modules can create alienation, discomfort, delusion, or paranoia. The brain abhors internal anomalies and will often go to absurd lengths to deny them or explain them away.
Privacy: your qualities and mental life are your own, alone. Although mirror neurons allow you to tentatively adopt another person’s vantage point, they don’t result in an out of body experience; this is because your frontal lobes inhibit the activated mirror neurons enough to stop you having an out of body experience. However, disturbance in this system lead to a dissolution of interpersonal boundaries, personal identity, and body image.
Social Embedding: the self maintains an arrogant sense of privacy and autonomy that belies how closely it is linked to other brains. To most of us with undamaged brains, it seems counterintuitive that identity (facts about a person) should be segregated from familiarity (emotional reactions to a person). But in Capgras syndrome (identity but no familiarity), and prosopagnosia (familiarity but no identity) we realise that there are different brain areas mediating different aspects of people.
Free will: you feel like you can consciously choose between alternatives.
Self-awareness: you are aware of the fact that you are a self. But there are some disorders that can nevertheless distort your self-awareness. Cotard’s syndrome is the condition where the patient thinks he’s dead; this is a form extreme and general form of Capgras syndrome. For a Cotard’s patient, the entire sensory world would evoke no emotional reaction; and it would seem to the patient as though he were in a dream. If the extreme opposite were to happen (extreme overactivation of emotional reaction to the world), the result would be an extreme heightening of empathy for others, self, the world, and it would feel like union with God.
- CONCLUSION: One of the major themes of the book has been the question of how your inner self interacts with the world while maintaining its privacy. When informed that their conscious self emerges ‘simply’ from mindless agitations of atoms and molecules in their brains, people feel let down, but they shouldn’t. The basic constituents of matter are themselves deeply mysterious with properties bordering on the metaphysical; so we need not fear that the self might be any less wonderful or awe inspiring for being made of atoms.
dianne_aguilera's review against another edition
4.0
I listened to this on CD. Caught myself more than a few times thinking about what exactly my brain was doing while I was driving! I would like to see/read the print version to view the diagrams and figures that were referenced. I can't say it enough - brains are fascinating.
aantakiraisa27's review against another edition
5.0
Whoa! What a mind blowing book! LOVED it! I always used to have debates with my friends who are not so much of science lovers that science can and will explain EVERYTHING! It just needs time. And this book seems like a tell-tale proof of my hypothesis. Astral projection? EXPLAINED! Why and how some of us "feel" the pain of other people? EXPLAINED! I remember once a guy I dated questioned my devotion to science and asked me to explain him why we find flowers beautiful if God didn't make us to find them beautiful. I couldn't answer him then. But if we were in touch now, I would have asked him to read this book. It has a whole chapter neurologically explaining why we find something beautiful.
A lot of the explanations in this book still needs scientific experimentation to turn them into facts from theories. But I haven't ever found any better explanation for so many things I have wondered about.
But the most tantalizing thing I discovered from this book is that how truly amazing human brain is! And all the myriads of permutations and combinations between the synapses, and the brain regions can scientifically, physiologically produce "miracles" "magic" "supernatural and what not!
A must read for all the curious minds out there!
WARNING: it's a tough read. I am planning to read it again for a deeper understanding.
A lot of the explanations in this book still needs scientific experimentation to turn them into facts from theories. But I haven't ever found any better explanation for so many things I have wondered about.
But the most tantalizing thing I discovered from this book is that how truly amazing human brain is! And all the myriads of permutations and combinations between the synapses, and the brain regions can scientifically, physiologically produce "miracles" "magic" "supernatural and what not!
A must read for all the curious minds out there!
WARNING: it's a tough read. I am planning to read it again for a deeper understanding.
chloethonus's review against another edition
informative
reflective
slow-paced
4.25
A very interesting book that gives insight into the inner working of the mind, how it changes when the brain is injured, and how our brain makes us different from any other animal in the world. I found it very interesting that art was also reflected on in this book, explaining why we find certain pieces of art to be visually appealing.
I have issues with the way the author speaks about autistic people, only focusing on people with severe forms of autism. The outdated r-slur is also used. I also take issue with the way transgender people were spoken about, it was a brief section, but there was misgendering and even more outdated terminology used.
I would like this book better if it was edited better, with proper terminology being used, as it seems like no autistic or transgender people were consulted about those sections.
I have issues with the way the author speaks about autistic people, only focusing on people with severe forms of autism. The outdated r-slur is also used. I also take issue with the way transgender people were spoken about, it was a brief section, but there was misgendering and even more outdated terminology used.
I would like this book better if it was edited better, with proper terminology being used, as it seems like no autistic or transgender people were consulted about those sections.
Content Warnings
Moderate: Medical content and Medical trauma
Minor: Ableism and Transphobia
davidr's review against another edition
5.0
This is a brilliant book by a first-rate scientist. Ramachandran has personally made some amazing discoveries in the field of neuroscience. His writing is lucid, and his enthusiastic, personable style makes this an informative, as well as a very entertaining book.
Ramachandran's approach is to investigate patients who have had varying degrees and types of brain defects or injuries. These patients acquire abilities or handicaps that Ramachandran interprets and analyzes, in the hope of casting light on the underlying structure of the brain. Some of these handicaps are quite bizarre, for example: blindsight, in which a person has only subconscious ability to see; synesthesia, in which a person sees numbers (or musical notes) in colors; fantom limbs, in which an amputee "feels" pain emanating from the missing limb; a condition where a person with partial paralysis vehemently denies that he/she has any problem; and many, many more interesting cases.
Ramachandran shows how important mirror neurons are, in making us "human". He explains why they evolved in our brains, and how central the feeling of empathy is to human survival. This topic is made exquisitely interesting, by Ramachandran's original analyses and hypotheses. What's more, Ramachandran often proposes experiments that could be used to test his hypotheses. Given enough time, I think that he would personally perform all of these experiments.
Ramachandran's approach is to investigate patients who have had varying degrees and types of brain defects or injuries. These patients acquire abilities or handicaps that Ramachandran interprets and analyzes, in the hope of casting light on the underlying structure of the brain. Some of these handicaps are quite bizarre, for example: blindsight, in which a person has only subconscious ability to see; synesthesia, in which a person sees numbers (or musical notes) in colors; fantom limbs, in which an amputee "feels" pain emanating from the missing limb; a condition where a person with partial paralysis vehemently denies that he/she has any problem; and many, many more interesting cases.
Ramachandran shows how important mirror neurons are, in making us "human". He explains why they evolved in our brains, and how central the feeling of empathy is to human survival. This topic is made exquisitely interesting, by Ramachandran's original analyses and hypotheses. What's more, Ramachandran often proposes experiments that could be used to test his hypotheses. Given enough time, I think that he would personally perform all of these experiments.
janine9vn's review against another edition
4.0
This book took me a long time to finish, as is apparent. For a lot of months I just never opened it my kindle because life got busy. So the first half of this book might be a bit hard to recall. This book is VS Ramachandran, a scientist in the neurology field, explaining and diving into some of his experiments and hypotheses for what makes humans, human. Overall this book is a nice combination of technical talk and good writing and getting the points across without it feeling like you're reading a thesis paper.
I don't really have much else to say. There is super technical language in this book but he does and excellent job of breaking it down where if you don't quite get it, you can still easily follow along and it doesn't diminish his message. This is a good read and a must read for anyone interested in psychology or neurology or other fields related to the brain and the body.
Also, mirror neurons are cool as hell.
I don't really have much else to say. There is super technical language in this book but he does and excellent job of breaking it down where if you don't quite get it, you can still easily follow along and it doesn't diminish his message. This is a good read and a must read for anyone interested in psychology or neurology or other fields related to the brain and the body.
Also, mirror neurons are cool as hell.
jenny_n's review against another edition
4.0
A survey of neuroscience discoveries and theories backed up by simple experimentation. Similar to the stories of Oliver Sachs. I actually expected to hear overlapping anecdotes but these were all new to me, with the exception of the phantom limb treatment involving mirrors, which I'd heard before.