Book Review: Phantoms in the Brain

A Brilliant “Sherlock Holmes” of neuroscience reveals the strangest cases he has solved – and the insights they yield about human nature and the mind. Using such low-tech tools as cotton swabs and mirrors, and working with patients whose neurological symptoms range from hallucinating cartoon characters to thinking their parents are impostors, Dr. V.S. Ramachandran uncovers answers to deep and quirky questions of human nature that few scientists have dared to address, including why we laugh or become depressed; how we make decisions, deceive ourselves, and dream; why we may believe in God; and more. This is inspired medical sleuthing that pushes the boundaries of medicine’s last great frontier: the Human mind.

He introduces patients with strange, sometimes extraordinary symptoms – a man who experiences orgasms in an amputated, or phantom, foot; a woman who is convinced that her own arm must belong to her brother; stroke victims who insist they can move their paralyzed limbs; an accident survivor who believes that his parents are imposters; perfectly sane men and women with hallucinations of animals, objects, even cartoons – and then offers his ideas about what is going on in the patient’s brain that would explain such symptoms.

Often he devises ingenious experiments involving mirrors, gloves and helpful graduate students to test his ideas. The results are a new understanding of how information from different senses interacts and how the brain forms new connection and updates its model of reality in response to new sensory inputs. The wide ranging author also looks into the brain for clues about the mystery of autistic savants, human laughter, multiple personality disorder, religious experiences and the very nature of the self. Besides informative drawings and images of the human brain, the text contains numerous illustrations demonstrating optical phenomena that demand reader involvement.

I was very pleased by author sober discussion of “qualia” and his careful treading on the question of religion and the mind-body interaction in general. His argumentation is overall very balanced; he comes across as an open-minded scientist who isn’t pushing any particular agenda, but is simply driven by curiosity. I didn’t find his elaborations on the nature of consciousness too enlightening but I guess consciousness is to neuroscience what the cosmological constant is to physics, everybody’s got an opinion about it and nobody finds anybody else’s opinion convincing. Altogether, I learned quite a lot from this book and especially the section on denial has given me something to think about.