The Emerging Mind: The Reith Lectures 2003

Vilayanur S Ramachandran The Emerging Mind

The Lecturer: Vilayanur S Ramachandran

Vilayanur S Ramachandran is Director of the Centre for Brain and Cognition and professor with the Psychology Department and the Neurosciences Programme at the University of California, San Diego. He is also Adjunct Professor of Biology at the Salk Institute.

He originally trained as a doctor and obtained an M.D. from Stanley Medical College, where he was awarded gold medals in pathology and clinical medicine. He also studied at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he was awarded a Ph.D. and was elected a senior Rouse-Ball Scholar.

He has received many honours and awards including a fellowship from All Souls College, Oxford. He is also a fellow of the Neurosciences Institute in La Jolla and a fellow of the Institute for Advanced Studies in Behavioural Sciences at Stanford.

He has lectured widely on art - as well as visual perception and the brain - and is a trustee of the San Diego Museum of Art. He has published over 120 papers in scientific journals, is Editor-in-chief of the Encyclopaedia of Human Behaviour and author of a popular book on neuroscience, Phantoms In The Brain.

Professor Ramachandran's work has concentrated on investigating phenomena such as phantom limbs, anosognosia or denial of paralysis, Capgras syndrome, and anorexia nervosa.

Although most of these conditions have been know since the turn of the century they have usually been treated as curiosities and there has been almost no experimental work on them. V.S. Ramachandran has brought them from the clinic to the laboratory and shown that an intensive study of these patients can often provide valuable new insights into the workings of the human brain.

Lecture 1: Phantoms in the Brain.

The history of mankind in the last three hundred years has been punctuated by major upheavals in human thought that we call scientific revolutions - upheavals that have profoundly affected the way in which we view ourselves and our place in the cosmos. First there was the Copernican revolution - the notion that far from being the centre of the universe, our planet is a mere speck of dust revolving around the sun. Then there was the Darwinian revolution culminating in the view that we are not angels but merely hairless apes, as Huxley once pointed out in this very room. And third there was Freud's discovery of the 'unconscious' - the idea that even though we claim to be in charge of our destinies, most of our behaviour is governed by a cauldron of motives and emotions which we are barely conscious of. Your conscious life, in short, is nothing but an elaborate post-hoc rationalisation of things you really do for other reasons.

But now we are poised for the greatest revolution of all - understanding the human brain. This will surely be a turning point in the history of the human species for, unlike those earlier revolutions in science, this one is not about the outside world, not about cosmology or biology or physics, but about ourselves, about the very organ that made those earlier revolutions possible. And I want to emphasize that these insights into the human brain will have a profound impact not just on us scientists but also on the humanities, and indeed they may even help us bridge what CP Snow called the two cultures - science on the one hand and arts, philosophy and humanities on the other.

I would like to thank the BBC for inviting me to give the 2003 Reith lectures. I hope the lectures will appeal to a broad audience, fulfilling Lord Reith's original mission. Given the enormous amount of research on the brain, all I can do is to provide a very impressionistic survey rather than try to be comprehensive. Of course by doing this, I will be oversimplifying many of the issues involved and run the risk of annoying some of my specialist colleagues. But, as Lord Reith himself once said, 'There are some people whom it is one's duty to offend!'

Although the lectures will cover a very wide spectrum of topics, there will be two recurring themes that run through all of them. The first broad theme is that by studying neurological syndromes that have been largely ignored as curiosities or mere anomalies we can sometimes acquire novel insights into the functions of the normal brain - how the normal brain works. The second theme is that many of the functions of the brain are best understood from an evolutionary vantage point.

The human brain, it has been said, is the most complexly organised structure in the universe and to appreciate this you just have to look at some numbers. The brain is made up of one hundred billion nerve cells or 'neurons' which is the basic structural and functional units of the nervous system. Each neuron makes something like a thousand to ten thousand contacts with other neurons and these points of contact are called synapses where exchange of information occurs. And based on this information, someone has calculated that the number of possible permutations and combinations of brain activity, in other words the numbers of brain states, exceeds the number of elementary particles in the known universe.

Even though its common knowledge these days, it never ceases to amaze me that all the richness of our mental life - all our feelings, our emotions, our thoughts, our ambitions, our love life, our religious sentiments and even what each of us regards us his own intimate private self - is simply the activity of these little specks of jelly in your head, in your brain. There is nothing else.

Given the staggering complexity, where do you even begin? Well let's start with some basic anatomy. It's the 21st century and most people here have a rough idea what the brain looks like. It's got two mirror-image halves, called the cerebral hemispheres, so it looks like a walnut sitting on top of a stalk, called the brain stem, and each hemisphere is divided into four lobes, the frontal lobe, the parietal lobe, the occipital lobe and the temporal lobe. The occipital lobe in the back is concerned with vision. If it's damaged, you become blind. The temporal lobe is concerned with things like hearing, with emotions and certain aspects of perception. The parietal lobes of the brain are concerned with - at the sides of the head - they are concerned with creating a three-dimensional representation of the spatial layout of the external world, and also of your own body in that three-dimensional representation. And lastly the frontal lobes, in the front, are the most mysterious of all. They are concerned with some very enigmatic aspects of human mind and human behaviour such as your moral sense, your wisdom, your ambition and other activities of the mind which we know very little about.

Now there are several ways of studying the brain but my approach is to look at people who have had some sort of damage to a small part of the brain, or some change in a small part of the brain, and interestingly when you look at these people who have had a small lesion in a specific part of the brain, what you see is not an across-the-board reduction in all their cognitive capacities, not a blunting of their mind. What you see is often a highly selective loss of one specific function with other functions being preserved intact, and this gives you some confidence in asserting that that part of the brain is somehow involved in mediating that function.

You are going to see many examples of this in my lectures but just to give you a flavour for this kind of research, I'm just going to mention two or three of my favourite examples.

One of my favourites is prosopognosia, or face blindness. When there is damage to a structure called the fusiform gyrus in the temporal lobes on both sides of the brain, what you get is a patient who can no longer recognise people's faces. Now the patient isn't blind because he can still read a book and he's not psychotic or obviously mentally disturbed but he can no longer recognise faces by looking at people. Now that syndrome is very well known but there is another syndrome that is quite rare and that's what we call the Capgras Syndrome, and I'll give you an example of this. A patient I saw not long ago who had been in a car accident, had sustained a head injury and was in a coma for about a couple of weeks. Then he came out of this coma and he was quite intact neurologically when I examined him. But he had one profound delusion - he would look at his mother and say 'Doctor, this woman looks exactly like my mother but she isn't, she is an imposter'.

Now why would this happen? Now the important thing is this patient who I will call David is completely intact in other respects. Now to understand this disorder, you have to first realise that vision is not a simple process. When you open your eyes in the morning, it's all out there in front of you. It's easy to assume that it's effortless and instantaneous but in fact you have this distorted upside down image in your retina exciting the photoreceptors and the messages then go through the optic nerve to the brain and then they are analysed in thirty different visual areas, in the back of your brain. And then you finally after analysing all the individual features, you identify what you're looking at. Is it your mother, is it a snake, is it a pig, what is it? And that process of identification takes place in a place which we call the fusiform gyrus which as we have seen is damaged in patients with face blindness or prosopognosia.

So once the image is recognised, then the message goes to a structure called the amygdala which is sometimes called the gateway to the limbic system which is the emotional core of your brain, which allows you to gauge the emotional significance of what you are looking at. Is this a predator, is it a lion or a tiger? Is it a prey which I can chase? Is it a mate that I can chase? Or is it my departmental chairman I have to worry about, or is it a stranger who is not important to me, or something utterly trivial like a piece of driftwood? What is it?

Now what's happened in this patient? What we suggest is that maybe what's gone wrong is that the fusiform gyrus and all the visual areas are completely normal in this patient. That's why when he looks at his mother, he says 'oh yeah, it looks like my mother', but the wire, to put it crudely, the wire that goes from the amygdala to the limbic system, to the emotional centres, is cut by the accident. So he looks at his mother and he says - 'hey, it looks just like my mother, but if it's my mother why is it I don't experience this warm glow of affection (or terror, as the case may be). There's something strange here, this can't possibly be my mother, it's some other strange woman pretending to be my mother'. It's the only interpretation that makes