‘Professor Brainstorm’ Article, The Sunday Times Magazine, by Dorothy Wade, 10 April 2011

 The 3lb lump of jelly that is the human brain is a cosmic engineering feat of complex chemical reactions and electrical connections. Inside the jelly are 100 billion brain cells, or neurons. Each neuron makes thousands of contacts with other neurons, resulting in trillions of possible permutations. “The number of possible brain states is staggeringly vast and exceeds the number of elementary particles in the known universe”, says Ramachandran.  

The brain is split down the middle, like a walnut, into right and left hemispheres. Each half controls the opposite side of the body, yet a child who has one hemisphere removed can recover all the functions of a child with two hemispheres. Wrapped around the brain is the cerebral cortex, where sophisticated thinking takes place. In humans it looks like a cauliflower because it evolved to be so large that it became folded, to pack more brainpower into our skulls. Like a large corporation, our brain has four main divisions (the lobes).

The occipital lobes are in charge of vision. The parietal lobes give us the feeling of our bodies in time and space. The temporal lobes are important for memory and language. The frontal lobes give rise to personality and morality, and act like a central executive, planning and organizing the whole enterprise. The brain also contains hundreds of modules with arcane Harry Potterish names (the locus coeruleus or the substantia nigra), each performing some function of the body or mind. The old view was that there was a separate brain module for every function; if the module was damaged the function was lost forever. But experiments by Ramachandran and others showed the brain could reorganize itself. This has radically changed our understanding of how the brain works.

“The brain is dynamic, and is constantly changing its connections…”

Incredibly, further simple experiments with phantom-limb patients showed that human brains worked in harmony with each other. Dr Ramachandran discovered this while working with “Humphrey”, who lost his hand in the first Gulf war. When Ramachandran stroked and tapped a student’s hand, Humphrey, watching him do so, could feel the touch in his phantom hand. It is now known that we all have brain cells that can share another person’s experience, even though people with intact bodies don’t feel direct sensations like a phantom-limb patient. When you watch a person being poked with a needle, your pain neurons fire as if you too were being poked. “They are the closest thing to telepathy that nature has given us.” These brain cells, known as “mirror neurons”, allow us to imitate each other and to empathise. In humans they may be responsible for language, learning, culture and civilisation itself. Ramachandran believes mirror neurons also offer a psychological explanation for autism. It is his contention that the absence of the neurons linked to our sense of self – which also help us to match the behaviour of others – offers an explanation for the condition, although not a cure.

Ramachandran’s team is now focussing on the parietal lobes, where they believe the “self” can be found. The parietal lobes combine information from muscles, joints and senses to form a “multimedia” representation of the self, and damage here may cause out-of-body experiences.

Ramachandran explains that people with some types of brain damage have a “fragmented self” and that studying certain disorders may illuminate the nature of the self. He describes seven aspects of the self: unity (you feel like one person); continuity of identity; embodiment; privacy (your mental life is your own); social embedding; free will and self-awareness. The self feels inviolable, and yet all aspects of self can be distorted by illusions, delusions, and disorders.

  

Ian Thomson, The Observer, Sunday 20 February 2011

Ramchandran's latest book amplifies on Nelson's phantom limb, and asks if brain damage can unleash a latent gift for language or art. A patient of his in San Francisco started to create hauntingly lovely paintings post-surgery; another began to speak in disjointed if poetic metaphors. Rather than dismiss such neural dysfunctions, Ramachandran believes they provide valuable insight into how the human brain functions. In addition to quirks of speech, he looks at such disorders as alien-hand syndrome, where the actions of one hand appear to act independently of the patient's will. (The left hand may close a drawer as soon as the right hand has opened it, or undo buttons that have just been done up.) The hand seems to have a "mind of its own". How?