Phantoms in the Brain - V.S.Ramachandran and Sandra Blakeslee

VS Ramachandran is a leading brain researcher. Sandra is an award winning New York Times Science writer. Together they put together some fascinating accounts of how our brains work with some interesting examples and stories. 

Some of the examples Dr Ramachandran has selected are about people who feel that their amputated limbs are real, someone who has a blind spot but who sees cartoon characters playing out some stuff in the blind spot, someone who says that her paralysed arm is not hers and someone else's, another who suddenly started laughing after a brain stroke and could not stop laughing until she died, one person who was normal in all respects after an accident except that he felt that his parents were impostors and so on. Each case being extremely complex which Dr Ramachandran tries to analyse and explain scientifically.

One interesting thing I realised which Dr Ramachandran explains is how different parts of the rbain seem to correspond to different parts of the body - for example the scratching sensation a person with an amputated limb felt was addressed by scratching on the relevant part of the face. For many the amputated limbs or the phantom limbs hurt. Dr Rama tried to use mirror boxes as a way to fool the brain which did work in certain cases.

Another discovery was that people who had lost certain functions like perhaps sight, would do certain complex activities like dropping a letter in a slot perfectly, leading to the conclusion that neural pathways develop between faculties and they seem to cope. Its also known that the mind completes information and images and draws a whole picture. One person would not accept that she has no hands and would insist that there was some issue which is why she was not able to move them. Dr Ram says that patients go through self deception - denial, repression, reaction, formation, humour and projection being some ways to deceive themselves. One another case of what they call Pseudocycsis where the patient develops all the symptoms physically, of being pregnant, except that she is not. Only when the doctor told her that the baby was stillborn her shape went back to normal - but she was back soon with her original physical condition saying that the doctor forgot to deliver the twin. Dr Rama discusses the concept of qualia or "subjective sensation" (meaning that only the person undergoing them experiences them) which is a fascinating concept.

Going deeper into what the self is Dr Rama and his colleagues figured there were many selves - the embodied self, the passionate self, the executive self, the mnemonic self, the unified self, the vigilant self and the conceptual self or the social self.

Fascinating reading for me as a layman to learn about the phantoms in the brain.