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A review by lizshayne
The Tell-Tale Brain: A Neuroscientist's Quest for What Makes Us Human by V. S. Ramachandran
informative
medium-paced
3.0
3. Also known as the average of 5 and 1, which is basically what this book is.
There are two super important caveats, one of which Ramachandran himself *says* but then fails to follow it and the other of which he is unaware.
1) When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. When all you have is neural connections, everything looks like (the interaction between) areas in the brain.
2) Ramachandran is entirely unfamiliar with the then prevalent and now even larger body of literature discussing models of disability beyond the medical and the "novel" idea that the wide diversity of human beings should be understood as ideal rather than a maladaptation to be corrected.
Obviously this came up most upsettingly in his discussion of autism (I braced for that chapter) and the way it was so clear to me that he was missing the value in what autistic people are actually good at in the process of tracking down which neurons are responsible for our failures. A less biased researcher might wonder take seriously the question of why it's valuable to a society to have people with varying levels of mirror neuron sensitivity and how having humans who cannot be easily convinced to follow others might also be valuable. But from within the medical model that sees variation as defect, it's impossible to have that conversation.
Having said that, the research itself is super interesting in terms of how the brain actually functions and how conscious experience is determined on a neural level. As with much in science, it's the imposition of the researcher's a priori perspective on the data that creates issues rather than the data itself. And, again, Ramachandran KNOWS this because he's not subtle in his digs at obnoxious colonial scientists who fail to appreciate what Indian art is doing. And in the process of skewering that perspective for what it fails to see, he steps into the same trap when it comes to ableism.
The aesthetics section was my favorite part of the book, though, and why I had picked it up in the first place. I particularly love the ways that art creates things that are more thing-y than the real thing and that is why we love it. I think I was already wondering, back in 2012 when I first encountered his work, how it applies to narrative and I think it's an even stronger question now that enhances, rather than explains, stories and why I love them.
There are two super important caveats, one of which Ramachandran himself *says* but then fails to follow it and the other of which he is unaware.
1) When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. When all you have is neural connections, everything looks like (the interaction between) areas in the brain.
2) Ramachandran is entirely unfamiliar with the then prevalent and now even larger body of literature discussing models of disability beyond the medical and the "novel" idea that the wide diversity of human beings should be understood as ideal rather than a maladaptation to be corrected.
Obviously this came up most upsettingly in his discussion of autism (I braced for that chapter) and the way it was so clear to me that he was missing the value in what autistic people are actually good at in the process of tracking down which neurons are responsible for our failures. A less biased researcher might wonder take seriously the question of why it's valuable to a society to have people with varying levels of mirror neuron sensitivity and how having humans who cannot be easily convinced to follow others might also be valuable. But from within the medical model that sees variation as defect, it's impossible to have that conversation.
Having said that, the research itself is super interesting in terms of how the brain actually functions and how conscious experience is determined on a neural level. As with much in science, it's the imposition of the researcher's a priori perspective on the data that creates issues rather than the data itself. And, again, Ramachandran KNOWS this because he's not subtle in his digs at obnoxious colonial scientists who fail to appreciate what Indian art is doing. And in the process of skewering that perspective for what it fails to see, he steps into the same trap when it comes to ableism.
The aesthetics section was my favorite part of the book, though, and why I had picked it up in the first place. I particularly love the ways that art creates things that are more thing-y than the real thing and that is why we love it. I think I was already wondering, back in 2012 when I first encountered his work, how it applies to narrative and I think it's an even stronger question now that enhances, rather than explains, stories and why I love them.