Phantoms in the Brain

Probing the mysteries of the human mind
Author: V.S.Ramachandran, Sandra Blakeslee
Subject: neuroscience
My rating: 3.5*



About the book:
Ramachandran is a well known neurologist, well known for his work on phantom limb pain and creation of the mirror box- an indispensable tool in rehabilitation of brain injured. In this book he talks about less known neurological conditions such as Capgras delusions (whereas the patient does not recognize parents and thinks they are impostors), one side body neglect (whereas the patient denies losing abilities in one side of the body), hallucinations involving cartoon characters, dying of laughing, the existence of an area in the brain dedicated to religious experience...The stories are fascinating and push the boundaries of the last great frontier in medicine: the human mind. Although lengthy and patience-testing at times, the cases presented are fascinating and save this book for becoming too drab. Skimming it towards the end...

From the book:

Pain is an opinion on the organism's state of health rather than a mere reflective response to an injury. There is no direct hotline from pain receptors to "pain centers" in the brain.

Your own body is a phantom, one that your brain has temporarily constructed purely for convenience.

Every medical student is taught that patients with epileptic seizures originating in this part of the brain [temporal lobes] can have intense, spiritual experiences during the seizures and sometimes become preoccupied with religion and moral issues even during the seizure-free or interictal periods.

My Stroke of Insight

A Brain Scientist's Personal Journey
Author: Jill Bolte Taylor, Ph.D.
Subject: Neuroscience
My rating: 5*

Author's website: click here
Book's website: click here
Dr.Taylor's video, the book in 18 min: click here

From the book:
'step to the right (hemisphere)'
'tend carefully to the garden of your mind'
'90 seconds of emotional reaction concept'
'Peacefulness should be the place we begin rather than the place we try to achieve'.

'Enlightenment is not a process of learning, it is a process of unlearning.'
'(another reason) why many of us may not choose happiness is because when we feel intense negative emotions like anger, jealousy, or frustration, we are actively running complex circuitry in our brain that feels so familiar that we feel strong and powerful.'

'Ultimately everything we experience is a product of our cells and their circuitry. Once you have tuned in to how different circuits feel inside your body, then you can pick and choose how you want to be in the world.'
'I must be willing to give up what I am in order to become what I will be.' (Einstein)

An Anthropologist on Mars

Seven Paradoxical Tales
Author: Oliver Sacks
Book website

My rating: 3*
Although the subject and cases presented are very interesting, the author's writing style was hard to follow and bland.

Keywords: colorblind, brain tumor

The book is consisting of seven medical case histories of individuals with neurological conditions: an accomplished artist who is suddenly struck by cerebral achromatopsia or the inability to perceive color due to brain damage; the case of a man suffering from the effects of a massive brain tumor, including anterograde amnesia, which prevents him from remembering anything that has happened since the late 1960's; a surgeon and amateur pilot with Tourette syndrome. The surgeon is often beset by tics, but these tics vanish when he is operating. More...

Quotes:
'Defects, disorders, diseases [...] can play a paradoxical role, by bringing our latent powers, developments, evolutions, forms of life, that might never be seen, or even be imaginable, in their absence. The paradox of disease, in this sense, is its 'creative' potential...'

Interesting:

• constant use of one finger in reading Braille leads to huge hypertrophy of that finger's representation in the cortex
• brain tumor caused damage to [his] pituitary gland; this was responsible not only for his gain in weight and loss of body hair [...] but his abnormal submissiveness and placidity (due to hormonal changes n.a.)
• damage to frontal lobes produce a subtler and profounder disturbance of identity

Phrenology = a pseudo scientific system that is based on the idea that indentations and convolutions form on the human skull because of the presence or absence of certain mental faculties. Phrenologists believe that they can read a person's character and mental state by the overall shape of the skull. Phrenology has long been dismissed as a pseudoscience, in the wake of neurological advances. (Encyclopedia Britannica)

Phineas Gage = probably the most famous patient to have survived severe damage to the brain. He is also the first patient from whom we learned something about the relation between personality and the function of the front parts of the brain. Click here for more info

The Brain That Changes Itself

Author: Norman Doidge
Subject: Neuroscience
My rating: 5*

Keywords:
Insular cortex
Neuroplasticity
Stroke, autism, brain injury, Alzheimer, pain, OCD

Author's website: http://www.normandoidge.com/normandoidge/MAIN.html

Insular cortex- role in emotions and feelings, addictions, pain experience
Meditation increases thickness of insular cortex
Meditation- self induced synchrony


Marshall McLuhan- 'All advertising advertises advertising'
http://www.marshallmcluhan.com/

You can see with your tongue- Paul Bach-y-Rita
http://discovermagazine.com/2003/jun/feattongue

Dr. Merzenich- Fast ForWord, Scientific Learning
http://www.scilearn.com/index.php

V.S.Ramachandran on Phantom Pain and illusions
http://cbc.ucsd.edu/ramapubs.html

Sea Gypsies
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2005/03/18/60minutes/main681558.shtml