Heroes Not Zombies

Phantoms in the Brain by Sandra Blakeslee and V.S. Ramachandran (ISBN 1-85702-895-3). Ramachandran is a specialist in brain research and I’ve both read some his previous writings and have often seen him referred to by other neuroscientists. His particular interest is in perception which he researches from a neurological perspective. The mechanisms of perception are much more complex than they seem. Take vision for instance. Many people have a vague idea that the way we see things is by light passing through the lenses of eyes, setting off some kind of impulses down the nerve fibres which connect to the backs of our eyes (the retina, which is made of of cells called rods and cones). These signals are then sent to brain, maybe you even know that they go to an area of the brain called the visual cortex. I guess many people who even know this much think of a kind of screen on the back of the brain where the images are projected, a bit like being at the cinema. It doesn’t take long however to figure out that this can’t be right. Who’s watching the screen? And how do “they” turn what they “see” into an image? No, it’s more complicated. In fact, creating an visual image involves some 30 distinct areas of the brain all working together! Ramachandran is great at explaining this kind of thing and in his book he covers not only vision, but all kinds of perception, discussing phantom limbs, memory, emotions and beliefs. He even has a chapter entitled “The Zombie in the Brain” about some of the automatic functions of the brain that go on below the level of conscious awareness.

There’s not much new in this book. If you’ve read works by Antonio Damasio (Looking for Spinoza, Descartes’ Error and The Feeling of What Happens) and Oliver Sacks (The Man who Mistook his Wife for a Hat, An Anthropologist on Mars, Awakenings) you’ll be familiar with most of the issues explained here. However, if you’ve never read anything about perception and the brain before this would be an easy and informative place to start.

One thing that really strikes me about these neuroscientists is how important individual experiences are to them. Ramachandran declares this at the outset. He says –

“More was learned about memory from a few days of studying a patient called H.M. than was gleaned from previous decades of research averaging data on many subjects.”

Individual case reports, case studies, real peoples’ stories, are dismissed by many scientists as anecdotes (and they never mean that as a compliment!), but in cutting the human uniqueness out of research conducted on groups of people and concentrating only on what is in common, on what the statistical averages show, learning is impeded. The “Evidence Based Medicine” movement (“EBM”) has created a whole hierarchy of evidence that tends to rate what is found in common (group trials and reviews of groups of group trials) much more highly than individual experiences of patients and their doctors. I understand that this method can throw some light on the usefulness of certain therapeutic interventions but unless we consider individual experiences our understanding will remain unnecessarily limited. Ramachandran points out that if I show you a talking pig, you’ll say “how amazing!”, you won’t say “Oh yes, show me more talking pigs then I’ll be interested!”

So that’s what I liked best about this book. It is scientific, easy to read, and based on the real experiences of real people. Individual human beings are completely fascinating and their stories are frequently utterly amazing. Phantoms in the Brain is full of amazing stories and after reading it you’ll never think about perception the same way again.