The human brain, with its 100 billion nerve cells and pathways, is capable of making more connections than there are particles in the universe.” With that one striking proposition, Dr V S Ramachandran, preeminent neuroscientist, describes the crux of his research. “So how do we even begin to chart it?” That is the question he and others of his tribe are trying to answer. Part of that story is contained in his latest work, The Tell-Tale Brain, which he launched at Chennai’s Landmark bookstore in Nungambakkam last week.
Perhaps necessarily, the study of the human brain is accompanied by a host of deeper questions scientists have long been reluctant to deal with — questions about thinking, consciousness and the nature of the self, questions that until now scientists have considered pointless.
Ramachandran, though, is no ordinary scientist, and over the years his work in cognitive and behavioural neuroscience has constantly broken scientific code. “Here is this three-pound mass of jelly,” he explains in his accented baritone when I meet him at the Madras Club the morning after the launch, “that is able to contemplate space, infinity and the nature of life. And it’s even able to contemplate itself contemplating these things.” That is the question that drives him.
The dynamic brain
The field of neurology has changed immeasurably in the last 30 years or so. At the heart of that change stands Ramachandran and a handful of others, most notably for reconfiguring a paradigm that held sway for hundreds of years — that the brain functioned through a set of distinct modules for specific functions (like touch, hearing, smell) which are fixed from birth and remain unchangeable. In Ramachandran’s scheme of things, these modules are more dynamic. They interact with each other and with the environment they encounter, leading to a picture of the brain that is more ‘plastic’. More importantly, it is changeable; it can reverse damage or dysfunction previously thought to be untreatable.
It’s an approach that has led to the treatments for which Ramachandran is most famous. He first came to international prominence for his treatment of phantom limbs (when a patient believes he feels pain in an amputated limb). It was earlier thought to be a largely untreatable psychiatric condition, but Ramachandran’s work with patients at the University of California San Diego (where he is professor in the Psychology Department and Neuroscience programme) using his famously low-tech approach led to one of the most effective treatments using just a mirror. Another famous diagnosis (which he mentions in the interview) involves the condition known as apotemnophilia, where the
patient develops a desire to have a body part amputated, not because he or she doesn’t feel that part, but because they over-feel it.
Neurology speak
It’s through these odd cases or anomalies, as he calls them, that Ramachandran seeks to illuminate the working of the brain — a system of understanding the normal through working with extraordinary patients. The focus of The Tell-Tale Brain, however, is not so much on treatment as it is on evolution, or our understanding of why humans are so profoundly different from apes or lower primates. In the book we come across patients like an autistic child with an incredible capacity for drawing, and people with synaesthesia — the condition of associating colours with numbers or colours with notes of music. Many of these experiments advance Ramachandran’s theory of the evolution of language, and of art and aesthetics. A whole host of functions, he argues, developed in hominids for various evolutionary purposes but came, over time, to assume the functions with which we associate them today.
It’s only in the latter of the half of the book, though, that we come to the questions that Ramachandran really wants to tackle. As the cases get complex so do the questions. We come across Yusof Ali, a young man who believes he has ceased to exist, or feels that he is actually dead and is inhabiting a corpse. Another patient, Jason, has Telephone Syndrome — he converses with his mother normally over the telephone but is unable to recognise or acknowledge her when she walks into the room.
Apart from the sheer oddity, what do these cases mean? Again, while they might be traditionally seen as psychiatric disorders (as in Ali’s case) Ramachandran proposes a neurological diagnosis. Do these conditions arise due to flaws in the wiring of the brain? What if there is a part of the brain that controls self-awareness, and what if this part is damaged in Ali’s case, so damaged that he has lost his sense of self, Ramachandran speculates.
And what if Jason is only himself through one channel, his hearing, and not himself through another, his sight?
Perhaps inevitably, these questions about the self then grow larger and we are asked to wonder if what we think of as the self is actually a lot more complex and fractured than we assume. Of course, these are deep questions to which there are no clear answers as yet. But Ramachandran urges us to consider the neurologist’s perspective when for years we have relied solely on the accounts of poets, philosophers and psychiatrists.
The one thing we can say with certainty is that Ramachandran and his colleagues are writing a new plot for the brain and its place in our lives, and that makes him one part “the Marco Polo of neuroscience” as Richard Dawkins puts it, and one part intrepid detective of the Dunknown and uncharted.
jayantsriram@expressbuzz.com