Bookraft

Phantoms in the Brain by V.S. Ramachandran and Sandra Blakeslee
This book is nearly 10 years old, and for the fast moving field of Neuroscience that normally means very dated and just not with the latest thinking in the field. Fortunately for readers, one has in Dr. Ramachandran someone who is not only pioneering in the research work he is doing such that his expositions stand the test of time by still leading and making sense of current research but also a superb writer of clarity on some very complex neuroscience topics.

But let me let the author set the tone from his preface: "There is something distinctly odd about a hairless primate that has evolved into a species that can look back over its own shoulder and ask questions about its origins. And odder still, the brain can not only discover how other brains work but also ask questions about its own existence: Who am I ? What happens after death ? Does my mind arise exclusively from neurons in my brain? And if so, what scope is there for free will? It is the peculiar recursive quality of these questions - as the brain struggles to understand itself, that makes neurology fascinating."

So in the closing his preface, Dr. Ramachandran sets the tone for his book - this will be a serious examination of the hypothesis that most individual behaviour and psychology can be explained by how the neurons in the brain work. And in the first three chapters, the author takes us into the world of the brain and its many specialized areas while helping readers understand the problem of Phantom limbs. This is the phenomena that as many as 35-40% of people who have lost limbs appear to still feel sensation and pains in those lost limbs.

What Dr. Ramachandran does is take the basic work by Canadian Dr. Wilder Penfield who discovered both a motor sensory homunculus and a second motor effective humunculus - these homunculi are nothing more than a mapping of the various human body parts to their sensory and then motor control regions - and these are linked specific strips or contiguous regions of the brain's cortex. This hypotheses already treads on neurological thin ice because there is a counter trend in neuroscience that say integration is paramount and these feature detectors and motor control centers are but bit players in a broader integrating framework.

However, the third chapter, Chasing the Phantom, Dr. Ramachandran makes a compelling case for the pivotal role for these tiny neocortex regions in eliciting phantom limb experiences. The author points out the folly of further amputations of arm or leg stumps in a fruitless effort to relieve severe phantom limb pain.

These revelations allow the author to bring readers up to speed in the basic anatomy of the brain and how neuroscience works through the incredibly complex machinery of synapses both outgoing on axons and incoming to the neural body through dendrites. But Dr. Ramachandran does not become enmeshed in this neurochemical quagmire - where the basic operations of memory engrams and neural plasticity still remain a mystery after 50 years of intensive research - see Dr. Mandels book for these labours.

Rather the next three chapters - The Zombie in the Brain, The Secret Life of James Thurber, and Through the Looking Glass brings the reader into the visual and sensory perception core. And again, Dr. Ramachandran leads by positing two visual pathways instead of a dominantly proposed one and uses epi-psychological distresses to support the somewhat controversial hypothesis. Again the thinking is ahead of the curve and now leads the field because much of the idea is gaining broad acceptance.

So can you imagine what the following chapters - The Sound of One Hand Clapping, God and the Limbic system, and Do Martians see Red ? - lead to ? Well I hope you as readers will find them as entertaining and enlightening as I did on my stay at St. Joes Spa and Hopital.