Product Description

Neuroscience can now begin to unlock the key to the self. Our knowledge of the brain has progressed so rapidly that it will change the way we think of ourselves as human beings. It will change our notion of understanding. This is a revolution which will have impact on all our lives. Neuroscientists are gathering new empirical evidence about consciousness and human nature; they are picking up where the great earlier thinkers like Freud, Darwin, Charcot and others began. This evidence begins to give substance to some of the grand statements and intuitive leaps made in the nineteenth and early twentieth century about the nature of the self.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #187872 in Books
• Published on: 2003-12-04
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 224 pages

About the Author
Vilayanur S. Ramachandran is Director of the Centre for the brain at the University of California, San Diego. He has a PhD from Cambridge and has had many honours and awards including a fellowship from All Souls College, Oxford and a Gold medal from the Australian National University. He has lectured widely on art, visual perception and the brain. He has published over 120 papers in scientific journals, is Editor-in-chief of the Encyclopaedia of Human Behaviour, the Encyclopaedia of the Human Brain and author of the critically acclaimed Phantoms in the Brain that was the basis for a two part series on Channel Four TV. Newsweek recently named him a member of 'the century club' one of the 'hundred most prominent people to watch in the next century.'

Customer Reviews

Readers beware!
In keeping with a dishonest publishing tradition that didn't exist in the 'good old days', the US title for this book is "A Brief Tour of Human Consciousness", so don't be duped into buying the same product twice.

The contents are OK; I have given it only three stars because it is in part a repetition of R's "Phantoms in the Brain", although appreciably shorter and without the novelty value of the latter. But the book is by no means bad: if it were R's first book, I'd give it four stars.
Keep in mind though that this is a popular presentation.

Cross-wired for consciousness?
The mysterious world of the mind is being revealed slowly through careful research. A major stumbling block to more rapid progress is that it takes "abnormal" conditions to understand the normal ones. People with aberrant mental or physical traits must be identified, tested and diagnosed with care and insight. V.S. Ramachandran's many years of study of people with unusual perception or behaviour patterns are the support for some of the theories of mind advanced here. Presented as a series of lectures, each topic demonstrates what happens when certain areas in the brain are either disconnected, or connected too well.

The notion of the "modular" brain resulted from the discoveries of Broca's and Wernicke's areas over a century ago. There are areas for vision, speech, colour, along with a "regional map" of the entire body. Brain "mapping" through surgery or scanning devices revealed various zones in the brain showing activation in particular circumstances. For some time many of these zones were considered independent of one another. More recent work indicates two unexpected phenomena - the brain "re-maps" and specialised regions may merge functions. People who have lost limbs or suffered strokes have unexpected experiences - feeling "lost limbs" or declaring loved ones "impostors". "Re-mapping" allows different areas in the body to act as sensory substitutes for lost limbs. Amputated fingers may seen react to touches on the face, for example. In some cases, such areas as colour perception and text recognition have become "cross-wired" somehow, resulting in people associating particular numbers with colours. the author proposes this is due to these regions exchanging signals that are normally kept separate.

Ramachandran describes many of the brain areas, explaining their role and showing how damage changes behaviour. Moreover, "Rama" postulates the evolutionary roots for how various functions were likely wired into the brain in the first place. This is a departure from many studies of the brain, and may provide insights for further research and therapy. How the human brain developed can be "reverse engineered" by careful identification of today's brain functions. Perhaps more significantly, the author also offers speculation on the roots of language and art. He's clear in limiting these factors to humans and excluding other animals. He postulates a set of "10 universal laws of art", explaining the meaning of such new terms as "peak shift" and "abhorrence of coincidence". Later, he unfortunately tries to tie in these ideas with a lengthy discussion of "qualia", a traditional concept shunted aside by modern cognitive scholars.

As a text version of a set of lectures, "Brief Tour" is necessarily indeed brief. Although he's careful to explain his thinking in many situations, clinical data, particularly that obtained by others, is necessarily limited. "Rama" tries to make up for this with an extensive Notes section at the back of the book. This segment is not to be skipped over as it contains much additional information. Comprising nearly a third of the book, the Notes are a combination of sources and foundations for his arguments. He provides a fine defence of the concept of "neurophilosophy" proposed an expansion of the classical concept. We have found too much in the brain, he argues, to limit "philosophy" to what we see externally. In brief [sorry!], this book has much to recommend it. Although it falls short of being a detailed "tour" it is a fine "guide" to questions about the brain that need further explanation.

Life is a matter of wires in the brain
The two main themes in this short but important book are that
1. by studying neurological syndromes, we acquire novel insights into the functions of the normal brain;
2. the functions of the brain are best understood from an evolutionary vantage point.

V. Ramachandran's examples illustrate profusely that there is no separate 'mind stuff' and 'physical stuff' in the universe. The two are one and the same. Mind is a matter of matter.
There is also an indisputable link between neurology and psychology: psychic illnesses have organic causes.
The author sees the brain as a model-making machine: virtual reality simulations, models of other people's mind.

The Darwinian aspect is always present. As T. Dobzhansky said (quoted in this book): 'Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution.'
Natural selection has ensured that the subjective sensation of willing is delayed deliberately to coincide not with the onset of the brain command, but with the actual execution of the command.
The hierarchical 'tree' structure of syntax in language may be evolved from tool use. Language itself is not a specific adaptation which evolved for the sole purpose of communication.
The 'booba/kiki' effect shows that there is a pre-existing non-arbitrary translation between the visual appearance of an object and the auditory representation. Lips are physically mimicking the visual appearance of what one is saying and together with tongue movements produce 'proto-words'.

This short book with an excellent glossary is very rich. Ramachandran explains further the seeing process, why we blush, that laughter is a false alarm, why emotion overrides reason, what are the characteristics of the self, how he sees the problem of free will, how artists (Picasso, Moore) discovered the figural primitives of our perceptual grammar ('Less is more').
He stresses rightly the all importance of neurology because 'colonialism, imperialism and war originate also in the brain.'

In a few lectures Ramachandran gives the reader an insight in his bold and essential work. His magisterial main book 'Phantoms in the brain' is a must read.