A Brief Tour of Human Consciousness: From Impostor Poodles to Purple Numbers Ramachandran, V. S.

From Publishers Weekly What does an amputee who still feels a phantom limb have in common with an avant-garde artist, or a schizophrenic who claims to be controlled by alien implants, or an autistic child who can draw a hyper-realistic horse? According to neuroscientist Ramachandran (coauthor, Phantoms in the Brain), named by Newsweek one of the 100 people to watch in the 21st century, the answer lies deep in the physical structures of the brain, and his new book offers a thought-provoking survey of his area of research. Through examples, anecdotes and conjecture, Ramachandran aims "to make neuroscience... more accessible to a broad audience." In this he succeeds admirably, explaining how the roots of both psychological disorders and aesthetic accomplishment can be located in the various regions of the brain and the connections (or lack thereof) between them. The text is engaging and readable , feeling as though Ramachandran had sat down for an afternoon to explain his research over tea (no surprise, as the book grew out of the author's 2003 BBC Reith lectures). Though the topic of neuroscience might initially seem daunting, readers who enjoy science popularization in the vein of Oliver Sacks, Richard Dawkins (both of whom enthusiastically blurb this book) and Stephen Jay Gould will find much to appreciate here. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. From the Inside Flap Preface My goal in writing this book has been to make neuro-science—the study of the brain—more accessible to a broad audience, to “workingmen,” as Thomas Huxley would have said. The overall strategy is to investigate neurological dysfunction caused by a change in a small part of a patient’s brain and ask: Why does this patient display these curious symptoms? What do the symptoms tell us about the workings of the normal brain? Can a careful study of these patients help us explain how the activity of a hundred billion nerve cells in the brain gives rise to all the richness of our conscious experience? I have chosen to focus both on areas in which I have worked directly (such as phantom limbs, synesthesia and visual processing) and ones that have a broad interdisciplinary appeal, in order, ultimately, to bridge the gap that now separates C. P. Snow’s “two cultures”—the sciences and the humanities. The book emerged from the annual BBC Reith lectures that I delivered in Great Britain in 2003. It was an honor for me to be invited to give these lectures, the first physician/experimental psychologist to do so since they were begun by Bertrand Russell in 1948. In the last five decades these lectures have enjoyed a distinguished place in the intellectual and cultural life of the Western world. I was delighted to accept the invitation, knowing that I would be joining a long list of previous lecturers whose works inspired me as a teenager: Peter Medawar, Arnold Toynbee, J. Robert Oppenheimer, John Galbraith and Russell, to mention only a few. I realized that theirs would be a tough act to follow, given their towering stature and the pivotal role that many of them played in defining the intellectual ethos of our age. Even more daunting was the requirement that I would have to make the lectures not only interesting to the specialist but also intelligible to the “common people,” thereby fulfilling Lord Reith’s original mission for the BBC. Given the enormous amount of research on the brain, the best I could do was to provide an impressionistic survey rather than try to be comprehensive. In doing this I was worried I might have oversimplified many of the issues involved and so run the risk of annoying some of my specialist colleagues. But as Lord Reith himself once said, “There are some people whom it is one’s duty to annoy!” Chapter 3 (based on the third lecture) deals with an especially controversial subject, the neurology of artistic experience, “neuro-aesthetics,” that is usually considered off limits by scientists. I t