Talk to Phantoms in the Brain: Probing the Mysteries of the Human Mind like its author wrote you back.
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What it argues
V. S. Ramachandran is a neurologist at UC San Diego who investigates the mysteries of the brain through clinical cases — not through expensive brain imaging but through careful bedside experiments that are often elegantly simple and deeply revealing. Phantoms in the Brain, written with science journalist Sandra Blakeslee and published in 1998, describes the cases that Ramachandran found most illuminating, from phantom limbs to denial of paralysis to religious experience.
The opening chapters on phantom limbs are the book's best-known contribution. Amputees often feel sensations — including pain — in limbs that are no longer there. Ramachandran asked why and produced a breakthrough: the brain maps the body, but maps can be remapped. When an arm is amputated, the cortex devoted to the arm can be taken over by adjacent cortex — the face, in some cases — producing the sensation that touching the face causes feelings in the phantom arm. The mirror box treatment, which uses the reflection of the intact arm to create a visual illusion of the phantom moving, can reduce phantom pain — simple, cheap, and derived from first principles.
What it gets right
- 1.
Phantom limbs demonstrate that the brain models the body rather than simply receiving signals from it. The model can persist after the physical limb is gone.
- 2.
Cortical maps are remappable. After amputation, cortex devoted to the missing limb is taken over by adjacent regions, which explains why amputees sometimes feel face-touching as phantom-limb sensation.
- 3.
The mirror box treatment for phantom limb pain — using visual feedback of the intact limb to 'move' the phantom — demonstrates that visual input can override other sensory signals and reduce pain.
What it covers
Who wrote it
V. S. Ramachandran is Director of the Center for Brain and Cognition and Distinguished Professor at the University of California, San Diego. He is also an adjunct professor at the Salk Institute. He is known for his work on phantom limbs, mirror neurons, and the neural correlates of a range of unusual neurological conditions. He has been named one of the hundred most influential people in the world by Time magazine and has received numerous honorary degrees. Sandra Blakeslee is a science writer who has covered neuroscience and brain research for the New York Times for more than forty years.
