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

by V.S. Ramachandran

Speaking of accuracy, let me be the first to point out that some of the ideas I present in this book are, shall we say, on the speculative side. Many of the chapters rest on solid foundations, such as my work on phantom limbs, visual perception, synesthesia, and the Capgras delusion. But I also tackle a few elusive and less well-charted topics, such as the origins of art and the nature of self-awareness. In such cases I have let educated guesswork and intuition steer my thinking wherever solid empirical data are spotty. This is nothing to be ashamed of: Every virgin area of scientific inquiry must first be explored in this way. It is a fundamental element of the scientific process that when data are scarce or sketchy and existing theories are anemic, scientists must brainstorm. We need to roll out our best hypotheses, hunches, and hare-brained, half-baked intuitions, and then rack our brains for ways to test them. You see this all the time in the history of science. For instance, one of the earliest models of the atom likened it to plum pudding, with electrons nested like plums in the thick “batter” of the atom. A few decades later physicists were thinking of atoms as miniature solar systems, with orderly electrons that orbit the nucleus like planets around a star. Each of these models was useful, and each got us a little bit closer to the final (or at least, the current) truth.