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A review by bupdaddy
The Tell-Tale Brain: A Neuroscientist's Quest for What Makes Us Human by V.S. Ramachandran
5.0
A must-read for anyone interested in what consciousness means, who ponders the ineffable distinction between electrical impulses governing motor function/perception and the experience of being self-aware.
First, his bona fides: he invented cures for phantom pains of missing body parts using mirrors. He also helped proved that synesthesia is a real perception phenomenon, not just a metaphorical association between sensations of different senses. What I love about both of these is that he did them using technology that has been around centuries - mirrors (duh) and sheets of paper filled with numbers or letters that have hidden shapes or pictures if particular letters or shapes seem to be a different color to you. These were waiting for anyone to try them out! (aside - one of the coolest things that should have clued us all in to the fact that synesthesia is real is that there exist people who are color-blind (say, red/green) and who are color/number-letter synesthetes who see colors 'on' letters and numbers that they never see in nature! They experience them as 'Martian' colors.)
In this book, he attacks the problem of how consciousness could arise through experiments like these (not just his, but lots of others too) and knowledge of various diseases involving damage to parts of the brain to suss out a lot. He acknowledges that experiencing qualia (I experience blue - I really see it in my brain) is different from having a buzzer going off when that light frequency is present as an electric eye might.
And he ends with a hypothesis (spoiler! stop reading if you don't want to know).
Self-awareness arose because of mirror-neurons - those neurons that help us have empathy. Those neurons that fire when we see someone raising an arm when just as when we raise an arm. Those neurons that help us take the perspective of another (usually human, not always). At some point, they decided to take the perspective of someone looking at us. Ourselves looking at ourselves. Now, first of all, as acknowledged - it's a hypothesis, not (yet) confirmed by clever experiments (and it's hard to see the experiment that would allow the development of this as an evolutionary advantage, if not of simply the existence of this causing consciousness). Second of all, I'm not sure that the self-referential perspective taking leads to actually experiencing all the qualia in my life. But it's a new concept I haven't run into before as an explanation, and I'm going to think about it for a while.
Finally, I have to ping him for dismissing non-human animals from having many mental abilities in here. He's clearly someone who's built a rock star career on testing things, but he categorically says no animals but humans are self-aware, or capable of metaphor, or abstract thought - or humor! I'll give him (complex) language, but only because that's been tested (and I think Alex the gray parrot may surprise him for the level of complexity he's talking about). Why couldn't he remain agnostic about those things? As he points out, a hundred years ago animals were considered incapable of suffering because stentorian scientists said animals were all automata. And any time I'm aware of that someone has finally come up with an experiment to test some ability of animals, they come out pretty impressively (can monkeys count? Can parrots add? Can dogs take the perspective of someone else? Do fish fall for optical illusions? Can they distinguish musical genres?) Also, one time I fell down and my dog laughed at me. How could I tell he was laughing? I don't know, but he was delighted. Maybe it was how his eyes danced at the alpha being so humiliated. Ramachandran had no business making blanket statements about things untested, and it was largely unnecessary - we can talk about the wonders of the human brain without saying other animals haven't got them.
Nevertheless, this ranks up there with Dennett's Consciousness Explained and Pinker's How the Mind Works in the pantheon of consciousness-pondering books.
First, his bona fides: he invented cures for phantom pains of missing body parts using mirrors. He also helped proved that synesthesia is a real perception phenomenon, not just a metaphorical association between sensations of different senses. What I love about both of these is that he did them using technology that has been around centuries - mirrors (duh) and sheets of paper filled with numbers or letters that have hidden shapes or pictures if particular letters or shapes seem to be a different color to you. These were waiting for anyone to try them out! (aside - one of the coolest things that should have clued us all in to the fact that synesthesia is real is that there exist people who are color-blind (say, red/green) and who are color/number-letter synesthetes who see colors 'on' letters and numbers that they never see in nature! They experience them as 'Martian' colors.)
In this book, he attacks the problem of how consciousness could arise through experiments like these (not just his, but lots of others too) and knowledge of various diseases involving damage to parts of the brain to suss out a lot. He acknowledges that experiencing qualia (I experience blue - I really see it in my brain) is different from having a buzzer going off when that light frequency is present as an electric eye might.
And he ends with a hypothesis (spoiler! stop reading if you don't want to know).
Self-awareness arose because of mirror-neurons - those neurons that help us have empathy. Those neurons that fire when we see someone raising an arm when just as when we raise an arm. Those neurons that help us take the perspective of another (usually human, not always). At some point, they decided to take the perspective of someone looking at us. Ourselves looking at ourselves. Now, first of all, as acknowledged - it's a hypothesis, not (yet) confirmed by clever experiments (and it's hard to see the experiment that would allow the development of this as an evolutionary advantage, if not of simply the existence of this causing consciousness). Second of all, I'm not sure that the self-referential perspective taking leads to actually experiencing all the qualia in my life. But it's a new concept I haven't run into before as an explanation, and I'm going to think about it for a while.
Finally, I have to ping him for dismissing non-human animals from having many mental abilities in here. He's clearly someone who's built a rock star career on testing things, but he categorically says no animals but humans are self-aware, or capable of metaphor, or abstract thought - or humor! I'll give him (complex) language, but only because that's been tested (and I think Alex the gray parrot may surprise him for the level of complexity he's talking about). Why couldn't he remain agnostic about those things? As he points out, a hundred years ago animals were considered incapable of suffering because stentorian scientists said animals were all automata. And any time I'm aware of that someone has finally come up with an experiment to test some ability of animals, they come out pretty impressively (can monkeys count? Can parrots add? Can dogs take the perspective of someone else? Do fish fall for optical illusions? Can they distinguish musical genres?) Also, one time I fell down and my dog laughed at me. How could I tell he was laughing? I don't know, but he was delighted. Maybe it was how his eyes danced at the alpha being so humiliated. Ramachandran had no business making blanket statements about things untested, and it was largely unnecessary - we can talk about the wonders of the human brain without saying other animals haven't got them.
Nevertheless, this ranks up there with Dennett's Consciousness Explained and Pinker's How the Mind Works in the pantheon of consciousness-pondering books.