Phantoms in the Brain: Probing the Mysteries of the Human Mind

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Phantoms in the Brain: Probing the Mysteries of the Human Mind

by V.S. Ramachandran, Sandra Blakeslee, Oliver Sacks (Goodreads Author) (Foreword)

4.28 of 5 stars 4.28 · rating details · 5,071 ratings · 278 reviews

What would you say about a woman who, despite stroke-induced paralysis crippling the entire left side of her body, insists that she is whole and strong--who even sees her left hand reach out to grasp objects? Freud called it "denial"; neurologists call it "anosognosia." However it may be labeled, this phenomenon and others like it allow us peeks into other mental worlds an...more

Paperback, 352 pages

Published August 18th 1999 by William Morrow Paperbacks (first published August 19th 1998)

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Dec 17, 2009 Joshua Nomen-Mutatio rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: consciousness-studies, neuroscience, cognitive-science-and-or-psychology, evolutionary-theory

Francis Crick—the "Crick" half of the famous "Watson and Crick" duo that discovered the structure of DNA—coined a term (and used it as the title for his book on the subject) called The Astonishing Hypothesis, which represents the idea that all human cognition and perception—every emotion, belief, existential crisis, perceived sight, sound, smell, etc—is essentially the product of (or equivalent to) complex clusters and pathways of neurons and the synaptic connections of neurotransmitters that bi...more

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Mar 05, 2012 Riku Sayuj rated it 5 of 5 stars

I think this was a good book to read after reading Susan Sontag. While Sontag says that the more we attribute a disease to our mind and to our attitudes the more it betrays our ignorance, Ramachandran tries to answer questions like "Can your mental attitude really help cure asthma and cancer?" - For example, VSR is courageous enough into venture into esoteric areas such as mind-body connection and divine visions and sound them out with science and a curious imagination.

The Victorian attitude tha...more

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Jan 05, 2009 Aerin rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: nonfiction, science, neuroscience

Neuroscience is an interesting field, not just because the human brain is inherently fascinating, but because as a science, it's still in its infancy. Lacking the comprehensive theories that characterize more mature fields like physics and chemistry, neuroscientists are free to speculate wildly based on sparse case studies and scant evidence. In Phantoms in the Brain, which is largely a litany of case studies of "weird" neurological syndromes, Dr. Ramachandran indulges frequently in such specul...more

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Oct 01, 2011 Lithium rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: non-fiction, psychology, science, favourites, made-me-think

This is a book about psychology, neuroscience, all the good stuff. Ramachandran is delightfully witty and approaches the big and small questions of psychology and neuroscience with curiosity and equal doses of scepticism and speculation alike. One of the truly good things about Phantoms in the Brain is that it is written with humility and humour. Ramachandran manages to expound whilst being hilarious and without 'dumbing down', so to speak.

The book isn't an overtly serious-nature thesis so it f...more

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Jun 26, 2009 Michael Alexander rated it 5 of 5 stars

HOLY CRAP.

This is the best book about neuroscience and cog sci for a popular audience ever written by someone not named Oliver Sacks.

Ramachandran is, as one of the cover reviews says, profoundly sane, and has a real sense of what you can get from the scientific method and what you can't, and really understands the way questions that used to be philosophical are inching into the realm of the empirical.

He also is sometimes hilarious, really up on the other great popular scientific thinkers out th...more

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Apr 15, 2013 Rachel rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: health-medicine, psychology-brain

This book gives an intriguing look at how the brain works, from the perspective of sometimes bizarre disorders. The author explores the way the various parts of the brain act and interact to give us the experiences in our lives. Thinking, emotions, perceptions—it’s all a product of a complicated set of processes.

Phantom limbs that hurt, or that feel like they can be moved. People who’ve had strokes and refuse to believe that one side of their bodies is paralyzed. Blind spots in our field of vis...more This book gives an intriguing look at how the brain works, from the perspective of sometimes bizarre disorders. The author explores the way the various parts of the brain act and interact to give us the experiences in our lives. Thinking, emotions, perceptions—it’s all a product of a complicated set of processes.

Phantom limbs that hurt, or that feel like they can be moved. People who’ve had strokes and refuse to believe that one side of their bodies is paralyzed. Blind spots in our field of vision in which we fill in the surrounding shapes, colors, or patterns. Capgras’ syndrome, where a person believes that important people in her life have been replaced by imposters or robots. People with epilepsy who have religious experiences during their seizures. The author looks at all these and much more, outlining what science knows about how the brain creates these scenarios and the larger part that isn’t yet known.

I was fascinated by the chapter that covered significance and religious experience. What people assign importance to is something that I find important. It is most likely not important to most people. Why is that? I developed my interest through a series of events (in the 60s) in which I also had some of the classic spiritual experiences. I noticed that my value system was changing; I assigned importance to a different set of things. My opinions about them weren’t necessarily different; just the significance I gave them. I believe that those experiences were produced in the same way as the experiences of the people, including those with epilepsy, that the author discusses. My experiences were produced by so-called entheogens. Being an atheist, I did not associate them with any “god” until I realized that doing so would give me a framework to look at (but not participate in!) religion. It is fascinating that there’s a part in everyone’s brain that can perceive a transcendence, or an identification broader than the individual.

And significance—imagine! You think of a friend and the phone rings and it’s her. You might think, how amazingly telepathic—it’s supernatural! Or you might think, what nice synchronicity. Most days, everything you see seems “normal,” of average significance. But on a rare day, everything might seem hugely portentious. Two people might see a bird fly by. One thinks, with heightened emotions, that it’s a sign from a recently deceased friend that there is an afterlife. To the other, it's just a bird. Some people have a chronic heightened sense of significance to the point where it’s pathological. And all of that is a result of things that happen in the brain. Specific things, though we don’t yet know exactly what they are.

The author predicts a breakthrough in knowledge of how the brain works in coming decades, on the order of the breakthrough in genetics with the discovery of DNA.

I also like his re-re-evaluation of Freud. Freud saw people with a lot of oddities in their thinking. He attributed the oddities to more-or-less acts of will, based on his own and his culture’s dysfunctions, especially sexual hangups. But, he was maybe the first prominent person to say that these things were important and worthy of investigation. And the author cites Freud’s “discovery that your conscious mind is simply a façade and that you are completely unaware of 90 percent of what really goes on in your brain.”

The last chapter was meant to pull things together and give interesting directions of inquiry into the nature of consciousness, but it didn’t do that for me. The concept of qualia seemed like overthinking. Maybe I am just not getting it.

The book was published in 1988, so it’s not state-of-the art—I think I’ve read more recent information about some of the topics—but it’s close enough for those of us who are not professionals in the area. I see that he’s written more books, and I will definitely read them soon.
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Mar 30, 2013 Marlan rated it 3 of 5 stars

All in all, a pretty decent book. It's got some great insights into how the brain likely works, using cases as examples, like patients with phantom limbs, blindsight, Capgras syndrome, anosognosia, and many other fascinating neurologic disorders.

From a scientific perspective, I view Dr. Ramachandran as quite interesting from a theoretical standpoint - he likes to dive into philosophy and conjecture more than other scientists. This is both a blessing and a curse. As a blessing, it makes his work...more

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Feb 18, 2012 Rebeccahowden rated it 4 of 5 stars

Like a lot of people, I’m fascinated by the brain. I love reading about neuroscience and psychiatry, but I’ve never formally studied science beyond year 10 in high school – so it’s always exciting to find a book that covers interesting aspects of the field in a way that is accessible and engaging to someone like me.

In Phantoms in the Brain, neuroscientist VS Ramachandran (with the help of writer Sandra Blakeslee) weaves together the stories of some of his most interesting cases and the discoveri...more Like a lot of people, I’m fascinated by the brain. I love reading about neuroscience and psychiatry, but I’ve never formally studied science beyond year 10 in high school – so it’s always exciting to find a book that covers interesting aspects of the field in a way that is accessible and engaging to someone like me.

In Phantoms in the Brain, neuroscientist VS Ramachandran (with the help of writer Sandra Blakeslee) weaves together the stories of some of his most interesting cases and the discoveries he has made about the “phantoms” that lurk inside the human mind. These phantoms are the things that cause the most absurd of disruptions, like being able to feel and even move a limb that has been amputated, or seeing cartoons in the middle of a giant blind spot, or becoming convinced that your parents are in fact imposters who just happen to look exactly like your real parents.

It’s these strange disorders that provide insights into the normal workings of a functioning mind – it’s when things go wrong that we can start to learn how things should be working. Amazingly, the entirely bizarre starts to sort of make sense, and even if his theories don’t necessarily explain everything (as no theory in neuroscience ever really can), or even turn out to be correct they are definitely thought provoking.

Over the first few chapters, Ramachandran presents a fascinating theory to explain phantom limbs – the peculiar phenomenon in which a person who has had a limb amputated continues to feel as if the limb is still there. Some experience the sensation of being able to move their phantom limbs – like Tom, whose felt that his phantom arm could reach out for objects, and even experienced the sensation of picking them up – and some suffer intense pain, which can’t be treated because to our limited knowledge it doesn’t exist.

Through his discussion of phantom limbs, Ramachandran provides a clear illustration of the way our brain constructs our body image, which opens up so many interesting ideas. Maybe the most interesting sidenote (which will be useful for pulling out when the right moment comes up in conversation) is a theory he puts forward about foot fetishists. When you look at the way the body is mapped out onto the brain, the genitals are located right below the foot. There are some interesting cases of people who have had a leg amputated and say that whenever they have sex they feel it in their phantom foot. When you think about it, it makes perfect sense – it’s the same theory as cases where touching the face causes a sensation in phantom arms or hands. So it could be that even in “normal” people, who don’t have phantom limbs, a degree of cross-wiring in the body-brain-map between the feet and genital regions can occur, so that sexual feelings can actually be experienced in the feet.

This same concept and ideas about the relationship between the body and the mind keep returning throughout the book, and we start to see potential links between all these seemingly disparate conditions. For example, there is a chapter devoted to “hemi-neglect”, a phenomenon in which a patient who has suffered a stroke in the right side of the brain seems to ignore anything that lies to their left side, including their own body. They might apply makeup to only the right half of their face, and eat food only from the right side of their plate, only becoming aware of the left side of the world when you draw their attention towards it. Similarly, “denial” sometimes occurs in patients who have been paralysed on the left side of their body – their brain simply will not acknowledge the paralysis. They will claim to be able to move their left hand and perform complex tasks with it, and even make up elaborate excuses when they are challenged.

Ramachandran’s theories provide some insight into why these conditions might occur, but just as interestingly, he connects it to the everyday functioning of a “normal” human brain. “What I didn’t realize when I began these experiments is that they would take me to the heart of human nature,” he says. “For denial is something we do all our lives, whether we are temporarily ignoring the bills accumulating in our tray or defiantly denying the finality and humiliation of death”.

I started to wonder more about how this body-mapping, along with ideas about denial and neglect, could impact body image in the way we usually think of the term, and how maybe some of Ramachandran’s ideas could be used to treat (or gain a better understanding of) conditions like body dysmorphia and eating disorders. What if you could somehow “trick” the brain into seeing what it is unable to see?Ramachandran briefly touches on the possibilities of this and I hope one day he or someone else looks into it more closely, because I think it could be fascinating.

Other case studies Phantoms in the Brain explores include Diane, who suffered carbon monoxide poisoning that left her completely blind – but was able to grasp objects and navigate complex tasks with startling precision. For example, if you asked her to post a letter through a mail slot, she could do it perfectly, with no knowledge of being able to see. This is a phenomenon called “blindsight”, described by Ramachandran as almost like a zombie inside Diane performing those actions without her being aware of it. Cases like these open up a complex discussion about what vision actually is – over 30 regions in the brain are involved in seeing, and only a small few of them are responsible for the consciousness or awareness of sight.

The book touches on a number of other interesting conditions, like Carpgras syndrome, where a patient believes his close relatives are imposters, and pseudocyesis, known commonly as phantom pregnancy. In the last few chapters, he turns his focus to spiritual experiences – not, as he is quick to clarify, to determine whether or not these experiences are “real”, but to gain an insight into what happens in the brain when one experiences them.

This is a book that is engaging and easy to read, without being too simplistic. Key concepts are explained to provide enough of an understanding for the layman to connect with the theory, so that no matter what level of scientific knowledge you come to the book with, you’ll still go away from it with some fascinating ideas about that eternal puzzle of how our brains work to perceive reality.

Cross posted: http://rebeccahowden.com.au/review-ph... (less)

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Feb 09, 2012 Daniel Solera rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: science, psychology

This book ended up on my reading list for several reasons, but I didn't decide to really get into it until I noticed that Oliver Sacks had written the foreword. Having read a few of his books, I decided to give Dr. Ramachandran's look into the peculiar world of outlier psychology a shot.

The book is a fascinating read. It talks about the brain's elusive behavior and how it is possible that so many bizarre cases of abnormal psychology exist. Many cases that we would describe as crazy, he breaks do...more This book ended up on my reading list for several reasons, but I didn't decide to really get into it until I noticed that Oliver Sacks had written the foreword. Having read a few of his books, I decided to give Dr. Ramachandran's look into the peculiar world of outlier psychology a shot.

The book is a fascinating read. It talks about the brain's elusive behavior and how it is possible that so many bizarre cases of abnormal psychology exist. Many cases that we would describe as crazy, he breaks down into meticulous detail, explaining how different parts of the brain interact with each other to yield odd and otherwise inexplicable behavior. We've all heard of phantom pains, or the phenomenon experienced by amputees where they can still feel their now-gone limb, often feeling pain or other sensations. Logic would dictate that given the absolute lack of skin, flesh, or nerve endings, that this would be impossible. And yet, we can't objectively say that people are wrong if they legitimately feel something. So what can anyone do about this and how do we explain its existence?

Dr. Ramachandran attempts to answer these and many other questions in the course of this book. We read about blind spots in the eye and how our brain "fills" them in; about otherwise normal people who believe their parents are impostors who look identical to their real parents; about women who show every single sign of pregnancy except the baby and other remarkable psychological anomalies.

Some of these cases are incredibly interesting because they discuss the tight relationship between sight and experience. One woman who has suffered a brain injury is given an envelope and asked to insert it into a slot. Given her condition, she is unable to do so. But when placed near the slot, she automatically aligns it perfectly. He discusses optical illusions that make it seem like one circle is larger than the others, when they're actually the same size. In a controlled experiment, when asked to pick up any of the circles, participants would reach out and a camera would measure how wide their fingers separated. Curiously, they were always the same distance, regardless of which circle they had chosen. So while the brain tells them that they are different sizes, the body seems to "know" differently. Ramachandran calls this, and other cases, an example of a "zombie" in the brain, acting on our behalf without our conscious input.

So the book's most intriguing aspect isn't necessarily its encyclopaedic selection of strange cases. I'd give that prize to the philosophical undertones that accompany each examination. These musings range from discussions on free will (the brain seems to do a lot of thinking and acting on its own), to pondering the nature of self (questioning the idea of the "ghost in the machine" and whether we should even be talking about souls anymore).

Towards the end, I did get a bit lost, mostly in his discussions of qualia. But given that the book isn't very long (shy of 300 pages), that didn't sour my enjoyment.(less)

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Sep 10, 2011 Jennifer rated it 5 of 5 stars

Completely in awe of this scientist and his exciting work. I'd be interested to know how Ramachandran's work is viewed by other neurologists in the field (and philosophers too - he ventures daringly into their sovereign terrain a few times) since he adds a coda onto certain chapters explaining many of his own as of yet untested hypotheses and the experiments he still dreams of doing. He often tacitly invites the reader to play detective in-step alongside him and walks the reader through the info...more

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Dec 09, 2010 Brent rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: science

This book is great. I love the author's style of writing (colloquial and accessible), his way of thinking (humble but free), and his philosophy of science (acknowledging human fallibility and the limits of science). It was fascinating learning about the author's own reconciliation of Eastern religion, Western medicine, and science. This was more implied than explicit, but still intrigued me. The subject matter has virtually no overlap, but I was reminded of Reza Aslan in No god but God in that s...more This book is great. I love the author's style of writing (colloquial and accessible), his way of thinking (humble but free), and his philosophy of science (acknowledging human fallibility and the limits of science). It was fascinating learning about the author's own reconciliation of Eastern religion, Western medicine, and science. This was more implied than explicit, but still intrigued me. The subject matter has virtually no overlap, but I was reminded of Reza Aslan in No god but God in that someone of Eastern faith and Western education taking a stand and defending themselves and in the process defending humanity and its quirks, as opposed to peddling forward the great conformity machine.

But besides that, neurology, psychiatry, and philosophy are all fascinating and important to me and this book was about all three. Ramachandran's stated goal is trying to answer many classical inquiries for instance, "What is real?" with science and empirical evidence, instead of just rational thought. And it's amazing how much of such a daunting question can be explored in the human brain studying people with different conditions.

I tend to think of history in terms of journeys more than destinations. It's rare for me to see something as an end and I'm skeptical if ends exist at all, but I don't feel like ends are what I'm looking for. I don't see thinking as going anywhere so much as just a way of going.

A friend loaned this book to me back in the summer and it sat around in my room neglected for a while until I finally gave it a turn. When I finally did pick it up, I stayed up all night until it was finished. Then I returned it. The time between is just astounding and I've already conjured up a phantasmagoria of serendipity and serenity to explain it all. I was happy to see them, smiling while we talked, and dancing in my car the whole way home.

Maybe it's all in my head, but that doesn't mean it's not real. And maybe I'd be better off without it, but that doesn't mean it'll go away.(less)

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May 28, 2011 Steve rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: science

Fascinating stuff. Ramachandran explores the relatively new field of neuroscience, through speculation, hypothesises and some fairly low-tech experimentation – conjuring an image of a brain that perceives reality through complex pathways which can warp reality in strange ways when damaged, revealing to the neuroscientist how these pathways interconnect, how the mind works. Throughout the book examples of patients that have suffered damage to their brains are used to illustrate the function versu...more

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Aug 22, 2010 Joshua Stein rated it 4 of 5 stars

Dr. Ramachandran is a brilliant mind and easy to follow. His ability to walk through case studies and apply them to the theories of medical science in the field makes him incredibly easy to follow and to see the connections between the symptoms and the best theories about the underlying condition.

It's tough for me to read something outside my field because I always wonder what will happen if the author is misrepresenting areas of his field, creating strawmen or simply failing to point out that t...more

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May 08, 2009 Christopher Campbell rated it 4 of 5 stars

One may not initially find a book on modern psychology particularly interesting, but in the same vein as Charles Darwin's Origin of Species and Benjamin Kidd's Social Evolution, V.S. Ramachandran brings the reader on an interesting, enlightening, and entertaining journey through the human mind by exploring abnormal psychological cases. I enjoyed the book for it's conversational quality (it reads as if V.S. Ramachandran is in the room with you, Indian accent and all, explaining the details of his...more

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Apr 23, 2011 Raghu rated it 5 of 5 stars

This is a path-breaking book investigating the architecture of the human brain. Questions are asked and answered in diverse subjects ranging from 'what is the Self?' and 'what is a religious experience?' to 'why someone with a severed arm feels his phantom fingers and routinely counts on them or feels pain in them'. What is interesting about Dr.Ramachandran's approach is that he probes and experiments with these questions in simple, non-invasive and shall I say, 'non-violent methods' and answers...more This is a path-breaking book investigating the architecture of the human brain. Questions are asked and answered in diverse subjects ranging from 'what is the Self?' and 'what is a religious experience?' to 'why someone with a severed arm feels his phantom fingers and routinely counts on them or feels pain in them'. What is interesting about Dr.Ramachandran's approach is that he probes and experiments with these questions in simple, non-invasive and shall I say, 'non-violent methods' and answers them.
Some of the most interesting work in the book that appealed to me are as follows:

1. The "phantom limb syndrome" which occurs when people continue to experience the presence and 'use' of one of the amputated parts of their body. Dr.Ramachandran says that the experience of the phantom limb arises because the region of the brain which controls the (now amputated) limb gets populated by neurons from the physically adjacent regions of the brain. For example, in the brain, the regions which control the arm, the face and the foot are adjacent to each other. So, neurons from the 'face' occupy the now vacated space of the 'arm'. When this happens in an affected person's brain, she would feel her non-existent arm being stimulated when her face is stroked. An even more striking example of such remapping occurs in some people with their phantom foot. The regions for control of the genitals and the foot are next to each other in the brain. Such people experience orgasms in the phantom foot! Dr.R wonders about our attempts at playing 'footsies' in this context as part of our sexual rituals!

2. Zombies in the Brain -- Dr.R shows how we are unaware of 90% of what goes on in our brain! Our conscious mind is simply a facade! His experiments demolish our image of being a single, unified self fully in charge of ourselves. There are a multitude of 'zombies' inhabiting our brain which simply go on about their business without our awareness and in fact, are responsible for our actions! Kudos to Freud who said that our conscious mind is only a smokescreen!

3. Our Defense mechanisms -- The book has interesting light thrown on the various concepts advanced by Freud almost a century ago and confirms the validity of many of those ideas through Dr.R's clinical experience. This is courageous because it is so cool nowadays to denounce Freud. Many kinds of self-deception that Freud described are shown to have clear-cut, amplified evidence in Dr.R's clinical experience. Denial, Repression, Reaction Formation (the propensity to assert the exact opposite of what one suspects to be true of oneself), Rationalization (through Confabulation), Humor and the well-known Projection mechanism have all been discussed at length and validated by Dr.R

4. Religious or God experience -- We have long known that people with temporal lobe epilepsy often talk about having found "God". Temporal lobes are the interface between perception and action. Dr.R says that during an epileptic attack, the closeness between the Amygdala (emotional center of the brain), Memory (the hippocampus) and the sensory areas of the temporal cortex could involve enhanced connections between these regions of the brain. This would then result in the communication between them to amplify substantially and people would experience themselves and all events as being deeply significant and highly imbued with consciousness.
Dr.R contrasts this with people who suffer from Cotard's syndrome which makes them feel emotionally remote from the world to the extent that they will make the absurd claim that they are dead.
Both these discussions leave us wondering about our tenuous grasp of what we call Reality!

The book is very accessible even to a novice reader like me who doesn't know much about the brain. It is rare that one comes across a presentation of such revolutionary ideas in such engaging manner for the readers of popular science. Thanks to Dr.Ramachandran. (less)

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May 21, 2012 Katy rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: nonfiction

This book, written by neurologist V. S. Ramachandran, suggests that by looking at case studies of individuals with particular types of brain injuries we can learn a lot about the the human mind. He looks at examples of patients with phantom limb syndrome, vision problems, paralysis and other problems and uses his understanding of their neurological (physiological) causes to speculate on their implications about the structure and functioning of a "normal" human brain.

I found this very interesting...more

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Aug 07, 2011 Blyden rated it 4 of 5 stars

Learning about various neurological disorders, the theories behind their causes, and case studies, including many of Ramachandran's own cases was absolutely fascinating! Spellbindingly so! What he has to say about phantom limbs, blindsight, the distinct processing centers of the brain and how they relate to consciousness are likely to reshape your understanding of how the brain works. The implications for sense of self, and identity are also very interesting.

The weak parts of the book are when...more

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Aug 20, 2009 Jake rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: science

A solid set of neurology case-studies, in the tradition of Oliver Sacks. Ramachandran seems to have made his name explaining how different kinds of phantom limb syndromes function, and he's at his best when he's explaining the weird and miraculous ways the brain copes with the sudden loss of a part of the body. Also very good is the middle portion of the book, when he expands his survey to related neurological problems, including temporal lobe epilepsy (which seems to put some patients into dire...more

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Sep 11, 2009 Bogdan Dumitriu rated it 4 of 5 stars

A book of reviews of patients with different brain-related diseases, a method that - the author claims - help us gain insight into the workings of the human brain. And to me he seems right. In his own admission, much of what he suggests is speculative, but there's enough science in there too.

I've read about people not seeing with their left eye, but still perceiving information from the blind area, people losing vision only to have the brain fill in the missing world with, e.g., cartoons, people...more

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Mar 30, 2011 Ugh rated it 4 of 5 stars

Essentially a collection of very interesting case studies (plus embellishments) that illustrate how, with nothing more than access to a world's worth of highly unusual patients, a wealth of McGuiver-esque ingenuity, and the background knowledge that comes with being one of the world's top neurologists, you can shed light on some of neuroscience's must puzzling conundrums. VS comes across as funny, practical, and likeable, and towards the end he unfurls some lengthier theories that are not far sh...more

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Jan 19, 2011 s s rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: neuroscience

This book is intelligent, simple, scientific, and humorous. Galen once believed that wounds and diseases are mirrors into the mind and body. Ramachandran just runs with that notion and actually uses mirrors to mitigate and sometimes cure the symptoms of certain brain disorders. His work into the nature of neural remapping is clearly some of the best simplification of the complex processes underlying grand-scale brain activity. After reading the book, studying neuroscience with Ramachandran, and...more

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Dec 31, 2008 Mark rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: sci-tech

This starts off as an extremely good book about the author's direct experience and experiments dealing with the phenomenon of phantom limbs. It discusses the current knowledge of how certain parts of the brain works, and it relates some simple experiments that demonstrate how the brain-body connection is much stranger than we assume it to be.

But sadly the book trudges steadily down hill from that beginning. The book starts with the doctor's strongest specialty. Then it delves into cases he has l...more

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Feb 23, 2010 Ravi Menon rated it 5 of 5 stars

Brilliant book. I regularly recommend it to my medical students. It rekindles an interest in neurology that many students find daunting in its complexity and variety. Slightly technical for the non-medic, but well worth the effort. This leads one to a philosophical inquiry as well. I wish Ramachandran (and Blakesley) would update this book with information from the functional MRI studies that are pouring in now.
Some of the extensive notes are irritating in the sense that they are at the back of...more

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Jun 26, 2012 Aditya N rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: neuroscience-brain-consciousness

An excellent book providing insights into the working of human brain. The author uses an unique approach of understanding how normal brain works based on his observations of abnormal brains.
Dr V.Ramachandran also touches upon aspects like what is beauty?, why we laugh? etc.
His general rules about what makes objects more pleasing to brain
with examples form ancient Indian temple sculptures (Chola bronze sculptures) is wonderful.
I rate this book highly because of its ability to satiate large au...more

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Jan 24, 2011 Aaron rated it 4 of 5 stars

Despite brief and infrequent flashbacks of some of my college Psych classes, by which I mean my eyes would start glazing over while looking at BioPsych babble like "angular gyrus", "thalami", and "sensory homunculus", this book was an enlightening experience. Dr. Ramachandran brings his life's work - which is basically the study of human freak shows - into the layman's hands with his boyish energy and charismatic enthusiasm and humor. He takes something the size of a melon (the human brain) and...more Despite brief and infrequent flashbacks of some of my college Psych classes, by which I mean my eyes would start glazing over while looking at BioPsych babble like "angular gyrus", "thalami", and "sensory homunculus", this book was an enlightening experience. Dr. Ramachandran brings his life's work - which is basically the study of human freak shows - into the layman's hands with his boyish energy and charismatic enthusiasm and humor. He takes something the size of a melon (the human brain) and surgically unfolds it into something infinite and unconfined and totally mysterious. Going through his case studies and experiments would make me feel wonder and awe, and at times something similar to fear, when I'd start daydreaming about how impossibly complex and miraculous this thing inside of us really is.

A few examples of case studies I thought were fascinating:

-A woman almost died of carbon dioxide poisoning and lost patches of brain tissue responsible for vision. She was saved by her husband, but would be forever blind. She could no longer see shapes, faces, or recognize her own husband. A mail slot was placed in front of her in random positions either vertically, horizontally, or diagonally and she was given an envelope to place into the slot. She thought it was a ridiculous exercise because of course she couldn't see the slot. After being coerced to just try it, her hand would automatically move into the correct position and would fit the envelope into the slot, without any conscious realization of doing so, as if an internal zombie separate from her mind were guiding her actions.

-Another woman experienced a stroke which led her to completely neglect the left side of her world. She'd put makeup on the right side of her face and have no realization that the other side was bare. She had no idea that she was eating only the right half of her dinner plate. When asked to draw a flower, it would only have petals on one side but would look completely normal to her. An experiment was conducted - first a mirror was placed directly across from her. If a pen was placed behind her head on the right side, she would reach out and grab it immediately when asked to. But if the mirror was placed to her right, and then the pen was placed on the neglected side of her body, she'd attempt to reach through the mirror on her right to grab the pen and would become frustrated at her inability to grasp it; her left world had simply ceased to exist.

-A boy lost a connection in his brain that linked visual stimuli to his emotion pathways. After his accident, everything functioned normally except for the fact that he would swear that his parents were complete imposters. When talking to them on the phone, he'd recognize them and have normal affection, but when face to face he could not realize them for what they were. Because the emotional response associated to viewing a loved one was severed, the brain's natural adaptation was to assume something completely illogical - that they were imposters that just happened to look exactly like his parents.

-A woman went to the doctor after feeling her baby kicking and realized that labor was beginning. All signs of pregnancy were there: nipples mottled, breasts swollen, abdomen enlarged, menstruation had stopped, lactation began, morning sickness, etc. The doctor began the process of delivering the child but realized something crucial missing - a baby. The woman had completely forced herself into believing she was pregnant and her body had adapted accordingly!

-Or the savant that is able to tell the time of the day, to the second, without any clock or tell you the exact width of something from twenty feet away, like "that rock is exactly 2 feet, 3.75 inches wide". Omg wtf!!!(less)

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Mar 25, 2012 Tikva rated it 4 of 5 stars

shal-
found this book in ramot,
from dr. polk - introduced you to him,

i think that speaks for itself.
its almost vaca rite?

go get a copy...

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Oct 14, 2011 Zachary Rawlins rated it 4 of 5 stars

The topic and subject matter of this book might seem both overly grim and too technical to enjoy - but that would be selling this book badly short. Not only is a fascinating discussion of the function and malfunction of our remarkable brain and nervous systems, but it is well written, funny, and moving. Ramachandran is an amazing physician, and the compassion he feels for his patients, and the suffers of neurological disorders in general, is palpable. Plus, it is full of those fascinating storie...more

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Nov 09, 2011 Rahul Vaidya rated it 5 of 5 stars

This book is the most amazing book which I have read in a long time. Written in clear crisp language, this book provides a great insight into human brain derived from experiments. It is the experiments which makes the book interesting.

This book also provides some insights into long standing questions which great minds have been pondering about:
- What is consciousness?
- Why Religion/God?

I think brain is one of the fields which will see a huge development in coming years and reading this book prov...more

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Dec 29, 2010 Broodingferret rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: biology, psychology, non-fiction

Phantoms in the Brain is a wonderful collection of case studies, each of which testifies to the astonishing, albeit often terrible, ways in which an individual's perceptions can change on account of brain malfunctions. Ramachandran's writing style is clear and concise, as well as humorous, though he does tend to hypothesize a little too wildly at times for my taste. His research, however, is well-cited and fascinating and I recommend Phantoms in the Brain as a good pop-science intro (but only an...more

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Aug 04, 2011 Yasuhiko added it

実をいうと、８章までしか読んでいない。

でも、それまでに十分すぎるほどの内容が詰め込まれている。彼のひらめき、探偵のように謎を解いていく姿、そして、脳がどれだけ不思議と魅力にあふれているか、

読み手が溺れてしまうぐらい詰まっている。

実際、溺れそうになったので笑、

いったん、ページを閉じて、僕の研究に戻ることにした。

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About V.S. Ramachandran

Vilayanur S. "Rama" Ramachandran is a neurologist best known for his work in the fields of behavioral neurology and psychophysics. He is currently the Director of the Center for Brain and Cognition, Professor in the Psychology Department and Neurosciences Program at the University of California, San Diego, and Adjunct Professor of Biology at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies.

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Books by V.S. Ramachandran

The Tell-Tale Brain: A Neuroscientist's Quest for What Makes Us Human

A Brief Tour of Human Consciousness: From Impostor Poodles to Purple Numbers

Encyclopedia of the Human Brain, Four-Volume Set

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