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Diabetes: Sugar-Coated Crisis: Who Gets it, Who Profits and How to Stop it
This is a marvelous book, far deeper than most pop science and much more entertaining than any book I've read that reaches for such profound truths. I've been a health science writer for years -- see my books The Art of Getting Well and Diabetes: Sugar-coated Crisis on Amazon - and I've always taken a mind/body/social/environmental view. I thought my holistic approach gave a pretty complete picture. But Phantoms in the Brain showed me there is far more.
V.S. Ramachandran was born in India and received his higher education in England. He is better able than anyone I've read to integrate Eastern and Western visions of reality.
The book actually moves from West to East. The author starts by looking at different structures within the brain, what they do, and how they interact. He shows us connections that only become visible when they go wrong, for example in phantom limb pain. About half the people who lose an arm or leg to surgery or accident feel the limb is still there. About half of those people experience moderate to severe pain in the missing limb. What could cause this bizarre and troubling symptom?
Ramachandran explains where phantom limb pain comes from and describes some creative ways he has tried to help the brain accept the loss of the missing limb and stop the pain. In the process, he demonstrates that all pain, indeed all sensations, are illusions. They are created by the brain from various sensory data, memory, thoughts and feelings, and may have very little relationship to what is happening in the outside world. It's science proving the Buddhist concept that the world is an illusion and explaining how the illusion is created. It's also very helpful knowledge for people living with chronic pain, which I write about quite often, as you can see at [...]
He explores many other fascinating brain malfunctions - brain-injured people who come to believe their parents are impostors, people for whom the left side of the world does not exist, blind people who can reach out and grab an object they are not consciously aware of seeing.
Most interesting to me is a chapter called "Is God in the Limbic System?" and the last chapter, "Do Martians See Red?" These chapters explore questions that come very close to the meaning of life. Our limbic systems (located in the temporal lobes of the brain) are apparently developed to "see God" or experience "Nirvana." You can create those experiences for someone by stimulating the correct part of the limbic system with an electrode. Why should this be? How did it evolve and what does it mean?
I have my own theory about this - that Nirvana is actually the way life really is, so of course our older "reptile brains" (the limbic system) can perceive it that way. But even if this isn't true, it's a fascinating question. The final chapter asks whether, if our sensations our illusions, our sense of being separate selves is an illusion too. This thought brings science and spirituality so close together that I feel I can embrace them both at the same time.
This is definitely a book worth reading. It's written at a fairly simple level, fully understandable by a high school graduate. The footnotes give a lot of other fascinating tidbits. In fact, I think I'll go read it again now.
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This is one of the most interesting book about the brain I've ever read. Dr. Ramachandran teach every aspect in such a easy way, that you will love this book
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Neurology and the field's bizarre unsolved problems are some of the most fascinating and intriguing things. I love reading and pondering on such things as "the Phantom Limb" - experiencing pain in amputated limbs, "Somatoparaphrenia" - the perception that one's limb(s) belong to someone else, "Cotard's syndrome" - the perception that one is dead, "Anosognosia" - the inability to perceive that one has physical defects, dispite obvious evidence to the contrary. These are just some of the intriguing and bizarre neurological syndromes/problems discussed in this book by a pioneering Neurologist (V.S. Ramanchandran) who is credited with performing the world's very first sucessful "phamtom limb amputation". Read this book to find out how he was able to do it not with medication or surgery, but with a simple box and a mirror. Some have told me that you have to have at least a masters degree in a scientific field to understand this book. I do not get that impression however. I do think that at least a rudimentary understanding of biology would be helpful, but it's not necessary. This book can be read and enjoyed by any reasonably intelligent adult.
Reading books like this and pondering on the material herein helps us to appreciate the complexity of the human mind.
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Phantoms in the Brain is a summary of V.S. Ramachandran's experiences as a researcher in the field of neuroscience. In Phantoms in the Brain, Ramachandran combines personal anecdotes, well-designed experiments, and educated conjecture in an entertaining, well-written narrative suitable for anyone interested in discovering more about how the human mind works.
Phantoms is laid out in an easy-to-follow, consistent manner. In general, each chapter introduces a new case study, and Ramachandran recounts his clever experiments to burrow into the cause and nature of his patients' problems. He then often expands into a brief, layman-friendly description of the related neuroanatomy, which is typically supported by helpful illustrations and diagrams. Ramachandran then sometimes delves into conjecture into how his findings explain human nature. The layout of the book is excellent, as the chapters are clearly divided, allowing the reader to advance at his or her own pace.
Review
One of the most remarkable aspects of Phantoms of the Brain is how vividly Ramachandran brings his patients to life for the reader. In fact, "patient" is a quite sterile term for how Ramachandran interacts with them; he becomes their friend and leader on his quest for insight into their neurological abnormalities. Ramachandran does an excellent job of describing their mental deviations, from amputees with "phantom limbs" to stroke victims with "hemi-neglect," who ignore everything in half of their world (field of vision). He also takes care to keep his phraseology on the underlying brain anatomy as accessible as possible to the casual reader while avoiding neglect of important biological aspects important to the case studies. Ramachandran comes off as a natural teacher; his explanations are excellent. His style is fast-paced and entertaining while taking care to provide ample detail so that the reader understands the subject matter at hand. Often, he mixes humour and experiments that the reader can perform (such as blind spot experiments) into his discussion, making the book genuinely interactive.
Even so, the most impressive quality of Phantoms in the Brain is not its style but its content. The experiments Ramachandran conducts on and with his patients are ingenious; they benefit the patient while being both simple to perform and genuinely insightful into the underlying neuroscience. For example, in one case, Ramachandran presents an arm amputee who complains of persistent pain due to his phantom fist being clinched tightly and permanently. Ramachandran develops a clever device using only a box and mirror to relieve the patient's pain. His ingenuity and resourcefulness often prevails where many doctors' failed previously. However, his account does not stop with the improvement in condition of the patient; he looks into the science to explain the changes that occurred in both the neurological abnormality's formation and in his treatment.
Such experiments lead Ramachandran into one final frontier: the very nature of the self. As he put it, "what I didn't realize, though, when I began these experiments, was that they would take me right into the heart of human nature" (137). And Ramachandran does not hesitate to offer his opinion on what it means to be human. In this commentary on what it means to be human lies Phantoms in the Brain's one flaw: Ramachandran often overextends himself on his philosophical conjecturing, leading to premature and sometimes contradicting conclusions. Early on, Ramachandran declares that our inner being, "despite all its appearance of durability, is an entirely transitory internal construct that can be profoundly modified with a just a few simple tricks. It is merely a shell that you've temporarily created for successfully passing on your genes to your offspring" (62). He counts that "our sense of having a private nonmaterial soul... is really an illusion" (256). However, in the same breath he supports the notion that self-awareness is "no trivial detail, no minor by-product of mindless, purposeless forces. We are truly meant to be here" (257). He also extols the work of Shakespeare, yet admits that "the proverbial monkey with a typewriter" (197) could not approach his genius; an abstract "spark" is needed.
This philosophical conjecture does not severely hamper the effectiveness as the work of a whole. Ramachandran often includes quotes from sources as wide-ranging as Ovid, Shakespeare, and Nietzsche. These contributions, including an interesting retake on Freud, inspire the reader to think above and beyond the function of the brain to what it means to be human. He encourages the reader to think for himself, saying "the moral of this tale is that you should not reject an idea as outlandish simply because you can't think of a mechanism that explains it" (223-4). Regardless, the philosophical musings should not and do not take away from what Phantoms in the Brain truly is: an excellent display of V.S. Ramachandran's gifted and innovative research methods and his incredible results.
Bottom Line
Phantoms in the Brain is highly recommended for anyone interested in the field of neuroscience. In fact, Phantoms is a great read for anyone involved in experimental science of any sort, from economics to biology. His methods and explanations are brilliant in their effectiveness and simplicity, and Phantoms in the Brain describes them well. Every field of science could learn from this account of Ramachandran's studies.
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This book is a compilation of interesting clinical cases in neurosciences, brain injury and therapy, mainly unrelated to one another. You could easily read only those chapters of your interest.
It seemed to me that as "unifying thesis", the author chose the idea of the "self" and how it might be only a "phantom" of our brain, suggesting that the "unity" and individuality that we perceive as self might be an illusion created by the way our mind works. He illustrates how this illusion of unity is broken with some brain injuries, like people that "neglect" their left part of the body, people that see "visions" or people that don't perceive parts of their body as belonging to them but to other persons.
In the section related to phantom limbs, the author explains the idea that we are born with a "body image" that persists even after a limb has been amputated, that after such an amputation, the neural circuitry in our brains "remap" and that we can "trick" our brain with mirror images of our body, thereby demonstrating that our self perception is a "making" of our neural connections.
In another section the author states that there are two different neural pathways that start in the eyes, one that leads to the object recognition part of our brains and the other that allows for space awareness and motion. In this chapter, the author mentions that injury in the very first neural pathway can lead to people that see without seeing, meaning that they "perceive" and can act upon this perception, but they are not consciously aware of it (as if guided by a phantom in their brains, not by their conscious self).
The author does not succeed to unify all the clinical cases presented in the book with the "phantom of the self" idea since in most cases he does not make the connection evident enough, so what should probably be one of the main ideas of the book ends up being weekly supported and remains largely unnoticed by the reader. I do not fully understand the biological, philosophical and social implications of this thesis and I would have liked that the author had explored it a bit more deeply. Since the author merely suggests the underlying topic, I suppose he did not want to enter "dangerous" philosophical terrain and be taken away by making assumptions for which there needs to be more evidence (few authors resist commenting on their personal positions). So he saved his very good scientific material and clinical cases from becoming a subject of controversy and polemics.