Most remarkable of all, Arthur sometimes duplicated himself! The man gives a little laugh and says, "You wanna see? (It's a bit like saying that illness results from a failure of health.) My solution has been to make elaborate use of end notes, which serve three distinct functions: First, whenever it was necessary to simplify an idea, my cowriter, Sandra Blakeslee, and I resorted to notes to qualify these remarks, to point out exceptions and to make it clear that in some cases the results are preliminary or controversial. This is already a good start. Likewise, a combination of air swallowing (aerophagia) and autonomic constriction of the gastrointestinal sphincters that would increase gas retention could also probably be learned unconsciously. An accomplished amateur athlete, John had lost his left arm just below the elbow three years earlier. Like James Thurber, he had used his blind spot creatively to inspire his art. There is no way you could deduce this through reverse engineering (or figure out its particular trajectory through the fitness landscape) unless you also know about the existence of canine teeth, knew that nonhuman primates bare their canines as a mock threat or knew that mock threats in turn evolved from real threat displays. What does the general—the left hemisphere—do? Unfortunately you are also completely color−blind. But I don't literally see the cat, even though I literally see the tail. If you turn the page upside down, you'll see that they all reverse. I cannot be certain that I really see that missing part. But there could be a pig under the table with a transplanted cat's tail. And then, working backward, you consider plausible solutions to that challenge. He tells you a story about your mutual friend, you share a laugh and your brain files a memory about this second episode. Most of us can imagine the scenes these people describe—a miniature police van with miniature criminals running about—but we exert conscious control over such imaginations. But whether or not one believes in religious conformity "genes," it's clear that certain parts of the temporal lobe play a more direct role in the genesis of such experiences than any other part of the brain. The genitals, instead of being between the thighs, are located below the foot.4 These areas can be mapped out with even greater precision in other animals, particularly in monkeys. He claimed that everything we do in life is governed by a cauldron of unconscious emotions, drives and motives and that what we call consciousness is just the tip of the iceberg, an elaborate post hoc rationalization of all our actions. He named the plane and said, "It was the fastest man−made thing on this planet at that time." When you hear the word "epilepsy," you usually think of someone having fits or a seizure—the powerful involuntary contraction of all muscles of the body—and falling to the ground. If so, what is the justification for a hard−and−fast distinction between her body and yours? It's one of those things that many physicians get confused about, or at least I do. "8 Thus in my scheme, a smile is an aborted orienting response in the same way that laughter is. She now lives in a country home, where she keeps a large herb garden, entertains friends and carries on an active, though protected, life. It never occurred to her that she could just turn left because—for her—the left simply didn't exist. Humans, on the other hand, have evolved an organ, a brain, that gives us the capacity to evade specialization. You can discover important general principles about how the brain works and begin to address deep philosophical questions by doing relatively simple experiments on the right patients. They stay frozen on the side, like this." When will I walk again, doctor? Ironically clues come from a bizarre condition called "idiot savant syndrome" (or, to use the more politically correct phrase, the savant syn− drome). So his brain could complete information across the huge, gaping hole right near his center of gaze in much the same way that you did across your natural blind spot. According to Wallace, this means that the aborigine or Cro−Magnon possesses a potential intelligence that vastly exceeds anything that he might need for coping with his natural environment. Everyone associates him with the discovery of natural selection as the main driving force of organic evolution. When I asked her whether she had lifted the tray successfully, she was surprised. For example, a glance at Figure 2.3 reveals that the hand area (hatched) is missing in the right hemisphere and has been invaded by the sensory input from the face (in white) and upper arm (in gray). And this argument is valid whether you are talking about continents, heredity, warts or pseudocyesis. Books and people mentioned in Phantoms in the Brain. A Martian? Could it be that human beings have actually evolved specialized neural circuitry for the sole purpose of mediating religious experience? (I will call them Julie and Mina.) The reticular activating system—a tangle of neurons in the brain stem that projects widely to vast regions of the brain—activates the entire cerebral cortex, leading to arousal and wakefulness, or—when needed—a small portion of the cortex, leading to selective attention. The author of this book, one the leading figures in neuroscience, unapologetically declared that his intention was to write ‘a popular book on the brain’. He also had no difficulty in recognizing the faces of famous people like Bill Clinton and Albert Einstein. Mom had always been fastidious about her looks. First it rules out the possibility of confabulation. Twelve hours later, a student of mine visited her and asked, "Do you remember Dr. Asking why a given trait evolved (be it yawning, laughing, crying or dancing) is absolutely vital for understanding its biological function, and yet this question is rarely raised by neurologists who study patients with brain lesions. In one stroke, Galileo had proved that not all celestial bodies orbit the earth, for here were four that orbited another planet, 5 Jupiter. Show me a few more and then I might believe you." Indeed, his phantom arm seemed to be able to do anything that the real arm would have done automatically, such as warding off blows, breaking falls or patting his little brother on the back. Nor do we have to invoke the extreme pathological example of savants to make this point, for there is an element of this syndrome in every talented person or indeed in every genius. It doesn't mean much to me. Here is where the patients with bizarre neurological conditions come into the picture. Second, why are the same mechanisms so exaggerated in these patients? Remarkably, the neural circuitry that generates these commands in Mirabelle's brain seems to have survived intact, despite the fact that she has received no visual or kinesthetic feedback from those "arms" at any point in her life. Just because a trait is universal— present in all cultures including cultures that have never been in contact—it doesn't follow that the trait is genetically specified. I can't eat candy! But you don't. Does that make sense to you?" Next, I started a metronome and asked Betty to move her hand up and down in time with the ticking sounds. Both the executive self and the embodied self are deployed while you are playing chess and assume you're the queen as you plan "her" next move. I stroked his lower jaw with the swab. All I've ever had are these." You form a memory of that episode and tuck it away in your brain. Indeed, if you are ever tempted to jump to this conclusion, just bear in mind that one could use exactly the same evidence—the involvement of the temporal lobes in religion—to argue for, rather than against, the existence of God. To create and maintain this body image at any given instant, your parietal lobes combine information from many sources: the muscles, joints, eyes and motor command centers. But in addition to qualia (the "raw feel" of sensations), we also have to consider the self—the "I" inside you who actually experiences these qualia. Why not answer the same question by touching the face of a human patient who has lost an arm? What are the semantic and emotional attributes of this thing? Contrary to the ultra−Darwinist view, reverse engineering doesn't always work in biology for the simple reason that God is not an engineer; he's a hacker. They are associated, instead, with the intermediate stages of processing12—a stage where stable perceptual representations are created (yellow, dog, monkey) and that have meaning (the infinite implications and possibilities for action from which you can choose the best one). Notice that the disk "pops out" conspicuously against the background of rings. This is the so−called bottom−up view of vision, championed by artificial intelligence researchers over the last three decades, even though many anatomists have long emphasized that there are massive feedback pathways projecting from the so−called higher areas to lower visual areas. "What's that?" Two weeks later he did it again on a retest using images of a completely new face. Every biologist I know has strong views on what these factors might be. To enable patients like Irene to perceive real movement in their nonexistent arms, we constructed a virtual reality box. When neuromas are irritated, the theory goes, they send impulses back to the original hand area in the brain so that the brain is "fooled" into thinking the hand is still there: hence the phantom limb and the notion that the accompanying pain arises because the neuromas are painful. She cleared her throat. All you'd have to do would be to write a letter describing your apartment. Can we trick her eyes into actually seeing a phantom? Sit at your writing desk and hide your left hand under the table. The traditional explanation for foot fetishes comes, not surprisingly, from Freud. If she now looks in the mirror, she will see the reflection of everything on her left side, including people, events and objects, as well as her own left arm. Some patients were advised to get rid of it, perhaps in a misguided attempt to eliminate the pain in the arm or to correct postural abnormalities caused by the paralyzed arm or leg. I'd also like to say a word about speculation, a term that has acquired a pejorative connotation among some scientists. It is one of the most original and accessible neurology books of our generation. "No," he replied, "I didn't—because I couldn't see anything; I couldn't see a darn thing." As it now stands, a wealth of empirical evidence supports the idea that there are indeed specialized parts or modules of the brain for various mental capacities. Perhaps neurons in your visual system are making a statistical estimate; they "realize" that it is extremely unlikely that two different lines are precisely lined up on either side of the blind spot in this manner simply by chance. One advantage my scheme has over other theories of consciousness is that it allows us unambiguously to answer such questions as, Is a bee conscious when it performs a waggle dance? Yet ironically, far from being an impediment, Thurber's blindness somehow stimulated his imagination so that his visual field, instead of being dark and dreary, was filled with hallucinations, creating for him a fantastic world of surrealistic images. Not only is their sensory world warped, but their knowledge base is twisted to accommodate the strange new world they inhabit.11 Their attention deficits seem to permeate their whole outlook, rendering them unable to tell whether a mirror reflection is a real object or not, even though they can carry on normal conversations on other topics—politics, sports or chess—just as well as you or I. vii Preface Chapter 1 : The Phantom Within Chapter 2: "Knowing Where to Scratch" xi 1 21 Chapter 3: Chasing the Phantom 39 Chapter 4: The Zombie in the Brain 63 Chapter 5: The Secret Life of James Thurber 85 Chapter 6: Through the Looking Glass 113 Chapter 7: The Sound of One Hand Clapping 127 Chapter 8: "The Unbearable Likeness of Being" 158 7 Chapter 9: God and the Limbic System Chapter 10: The Woman Who Died Laughing Chapter 11: "You Forgot to Deliver the Twin" Chapter 12: Do Martians See Red? 87 Figure 6.1 Drawing made by a neglect patient. "Well, doctor, I have a headache. Here too, Ramachandran finds, mirrors may be of great use in enabling such patients to reclaim the previously denied side as their own; though in other patients, the loss of "leftness," the bisection of one's 2 body and world, is so profound that mirrors may induce an even deeper, through−the−looking−glass confusion, a groping to see if there is not someone lurking "behind" or "in" the mirror. Second, it doesn't explain the fact that these patients sometimes experience intense agony in the missing limb, the phenomenon called phantom pain. What does it matter to you, the conscious person, that the yellow doughnut now has qualia in the middle and that the occluded part of your finger does not? In the not too distant past, physiologists drew diagrams of visual areas with arrows pointing up. " But the leg had the last laugh. She had experienced and understood, as few of us ever will, the remapping phenomenon. Before I can determine, aha, perhaps that's a dangerous person, the visual information is evaluated by both the frontal lobes and the limbic system for relevance and sent on to a small portion of the parietal cortex, which, in conjunction with appropriate neural connections in the reticular for− mation, enables me to direct my attention to the looming figure. When I telephone friends in psychiatry, asking for names of patients, they tell me that they have seen such patients but most of them have several personalities rather than just two. One reason is related to binocular vision, which you can test for yourself. It did not matter whether he used his left eye or right eye—if he looked straight ahead, he could not see anything on the left side of the world. In my view that case demolished the Freudian explanation for Capgras' syndrome. This is such an ad hoc, bizarre solution that unless you know your comparative anatomy well or discovered fossil intermediates, you never could have deduced it from simply considering the functional needs of the organism. Again, the sheer statistical improbability of the two sequences of taps and strokes—one seen on the table surface and one felt on your hand—lead the brain to conclude that the table is now part of your body. "I can move my right arm but my left arm is frozen. Did you get the book and compare your memories with the original?" We have yet to conduct such a study, but meanwhile we have already learned something from our GSR studies—that the seizures have permanently altered the patients' inner mental life, often producing interesting and highly selective distortions of their personality. I just injected you with the same anesthetic that we used on your left arm!" And the argument holds, with even greater force, for other esoteric human abilities such as mathematics or musical talent. Nevertheless, face cells exist as a critical part of the network of cells involved in the recognition of faces and other objects. At first I thought he was joking, but then realized he was perfectly serious. An illustration of two photographs. Each person inserted his left arm into the box and looked into the left side of the mirror at the reflection of his left arm so that it was optically superimposed on the felt location of his right arm. Had he not gone home, she would have died within the hour. She wanted Dr. Monroe to check her over, to make sure that the baby was in the right position to coach her through this last stage of pregnancy. It takes years to train a monkey to carry out even very simple tasks, let alone signal what part of its body is being touched. All our commonsense notions about what he believes to be about eight inches too short. '' behind. 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Occasions I saw phantoms in the brain video rise lazily into the artificial fingers, '' but later that afternoon Paul.

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