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

Brilliant book

The book is good but its a fake copy. The author deserves every penny for this book

A very accessible book, clearly written with a lot of material that is well presented in the text. The author's tone is very personable.

Ramachandran has once again written a book that is valuable to his peers and fascinating to everyone (who isn't brain dead).I think Ramachandran is the most brilliant, creative Neuroscientist alive. Sure, he is very popular science writer. But if you aren't paying attention (e.g., some of the other Amazon reviewers), you might not see that he is to our field what Mozart, Picasso, and Einstein were to theirs.Many, many neuroscientists pick "safe" topics and stick with variants upon a theme all their lives. The work is often valuable, but it is not exactly akin to a spectator sport. Ramachandran, in contrast, chooses "sexy" topics to study. He brings "rasa"; spirit; passion to the study of the brain. And if you've ever seen Ramachandran speak (either to scientists or the general public), you know what I'm talking about, and you know that the book is not a fluke.Ramachandran does not think like other neuroscientists. Most neuroscientists pick a topic or area of the brain, and then do systematic, parametric, sensible experiments to map and test the minute details of their theory. There's usually lots of data collection and data analysis. But Ramachandran has a knack for creating "breakthrough" experiments routinely. In these experiments, the answer to a sexy question comes instantly, dramatically, and powerfully. Such creative, intuitive genius is extremely rare. Trust me, we'd all like to do science this way.I hope that we can appreciate that Ramachandran incorporates a wide variety of worldviews as he creates gem after gem. He is from the great culture that was and is southern India; he is a medical doctor and neurologist; he is a reknowned perceptual and cognitive neuroscientist who trained with master academics in England; and he is passionately insightful about art. I've heard people compare Ramachandran to mystics, healers and others. The cult status is of course a little ridiculous (see other reviews). But the enthusiasm is understandable. And the book, like his earlier "Phantoms in the Brain" is wonderful.Ramachandran has published a virtually identical book in the Great Britain under the title, "The Emerging Mind: The BBC Reith Lectures 2003." For some reason, the publishers of the American text chose not to emphasize the link to the BBC Reith Lectures. But in fact, the five Reith Lectures were presented, in edited form, on BBC radio. And more to the point, these radio broadcasts can be heard online for free at the BBC website ([...] The website contains a variety of demonstrations, as well as free transcripts of the lectures. One's enjoyment of the book can be enhanced considerably by listening to these five Rieth lectures. The five lectures correspond closely to the five chapters of the book, although they are not identical. The lectures, like the book, are highly entertaining.My favorite chapter was the fifth chapter, "Neuroscience - The New Philosophy." The central theme is the idea that the study of patients with neurological disorders has implications far beyond the confines of medical neurology. In particular, the chapter takes up the challenge of various forms of mental illness. As Ramachandran points out, "there have traditionally been two broad and different approaches to mental illness. The first one tries to identify the chemical imbalances, changes in transmitters and receptors in the brain, and attempts to correct these changes using drugs. This approach has revolutionized psychiatry and has been phenomenally successful. Patients who used to be put in straitjackets or locked up can now lead relatively normal lives. The second approach we can loosely characterize as the psychotherapeutic approach. It often assumes that most mental illness arises from early upbringing." Ramachandran presents a third approach that is different from either of these, but which, in a sense complements them both. He attempts to explain some symptoms of mental illness in terms of what is known about function, anatomy and neural structures of the brain. He suggests that many of these symptoms and disorders seem less bizarre when viewed from an evolutionary standpoint, that is from a Darwinian perspective. He proposes to give this discipline a new name - evolutionary neuropsychology.Also, don't miss the preface. The blunt humor may be too subtle for some people, but I loved it.

Great book for exploring brain and consciousnes!

this book was an interesting look at the subject matter of human consciousness. it takes the reader through various proposed models of the structure and organisation of human thought. it shows how scientific thinking on the subject is often driven by the insights gained from the study of abnormal and damaged brains as opposed to the systematic study of everyday consciousness.the book is a little too brief and light for my liking.ramachandran could have taken more time to treat his own ideas in more detail and, in my opinion, should have laid out the current accepted theories in a more structured and formal way.enjoyable and stimulating as an introduction to the subject matter but, ultimately, disappointing.

V.S. Ramachandran characterizes his work with a chapter epigraph that is a comment Sherlock Holmes delivered to his foil, Watson: "You know my method, Watson. It is founded upon the observation of trifles" (p. 60). To give you some small flavor of his work, consider the following trifle that Ramachandran used to create a neuroscientific bridge from ethology (the study of animal behavior) to aesthetics (the study of beauty)."Scientists observed that herring-gull chicks will start pecking their mother's red-spotted yellow beak immediately upon hatching. The mother responds by regurgitating food to feed her youngsters. Scientists also discovered that the mother doesn't even need to be there, as the chicks will also peck at a fake yellow beak. Even more amazing, the chicks will peck at a stick with three red stripes on it with more intensity than their pecks on mother's beak: 'They preferred it to a real beak, even though it didn't resemble a beak'" (p. 46).Ramachandran isolated this phenomenon under the neurological fact that our brains are wired to do the greatest amount of work possible with the least amount of work, and built it to an understanding of why humans enjoy abstract art. Using the example of the chick that "is absolutely mesmerized," Ramachandran delivered his "punch-line about art" (p. 47)."If herring-chicks had an art gallery, they would hang a long stick with three stripes on the wall; they would worship it, pay millions of dollars for it, call it a Picasso, but not understand why-why they are mesmerized by this thing even though it doesn't resemble anything. That's all any art lover is doing when buying contemporary art: behaving exactly like those gull chicks" (p. 47).Ramachandran provided these explanations as a window to the neuroscientist's approach to phenomenon, but he did not see these explanations in competition with the mystery of existence."Many social scientists feel rather deflated when informed that beauty, charity, piety and love are the activity of neurons in the brain, but their disappointment is based on the false assumption that to explain a complex phenomenon in terms of its component parts ("reductionism") is to explain it away" (p. 57).To illustrate this point, he described a man in love with a woman named Esmerelda."I tell you about the activity in her septum, in her hypothalamic nuclei, and how certain peptides are released along with the affiliation hormone prolactin, etc. You might then turn to her and say, 'You mean that's all there is to it? Your love isn't real? It's all just chemicals?' To which Esmerelda should respond, 'On the contrary, all this brain activity provides hard evidence that I do love you, that I'm not just faking it. It should increase your confidence in the reality of my love.' And the same argument holds for art or piety or wit" (p. 59).In the most important section of this short book (the text is 112 pages with 44 pages of rich endnotes), Ramachandran briefly presented his case that neuroscience is the "new philosophy." He humorously prefaced this chapter with the comment that "All of philosophy consists of unlocking, exhuming, and recanting what's been said before, and then getting riled up about it" (p. 83).A Brief Tour of Human Consciousness was originally delivered as the BBC Reith Lectures, which were begun by Bertrand Russell in 1948. His approach-conversational with vivid examples-coincides with his purpose, which is "ultimately, to bridge the gap that now separates C.P. Snow's `two cultures'-the sciences and humanities" (p. ix).In addition to this title, one might read Phantoms in the Brain : Probing the Mysteries of the Human Mind (Ramachandran & Blakeslee, 1998).