The Tell-Tale Brain

How does my theory account for this? How can someone be delusional about his mother when she shows up in person but not when she phones him? There is in fact an elegantly simple explanation. It turns out that there is a separate anatomical pathway from the hearing centers of the brain (the auditory cortex) to your amygdala. This pathway was not destroyed in David, so his mother’s voice evoked the strong positive emotions he expected to feel. This time there was no need for delusion.

Soon after our findings on David were published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, I received a letter from a patient named Mr. Turner, who lived in Georgia. He claimed to have developed Capgras syndrome after a head injury. He liked my theory, he said, because he now understood he wasn’t crazy or losing his mind; there was a perfectly logical explanation for his strange symptoms, which he would now try to overcome if he could. But he then went on to add that what troubled him most was not the imposter illusion, but the fact that he no longer enjoyed visual scenes—such as beautiful landscapes and flower gardens— which had been immensely pleasing prior to the accident. Nor did he enjoy great works of art like he used to. His knowledge that this was caused by the disconnection in his brain did not restore the appeal of flowers or art. This made me wonder whether these connections might play a role in all of us when we enjoy art. Can we study these connections to explore the neural basis of our aesthetic response to beauty? I’ll return to this question when we discuss the neurology of art in Chapters 7 and 8.

One last twist to this strange tale. It was late at night and I was in bed, when the phone rang. I woke up and looked at the clock: it was 4 A.M. It was an attorney. He was calling me from London and had apparently overlooked the time difference.

“Is this Dr. Ramachandran?”

“Yes it is,” I mumbled, still half-asleep.

“I am Mr. Watson. We have a case we would like your opinion on. Perhaps you could fly over and examine the patient?”

“What’s this all about?” I said, trying not to sound irritated.

“My client, Mr. Dobbs, was in a car accident,” he said. “He was unconscious for several days. When he came out of it he was quite normal except for a slight difficulty finding the right word when he talks.”

“Well, I’m happy to hear that,” I said. “Some slight word-finding difficulty is extremely common after brain injury—no matter where the injury is.” There was a pause. So I asked, “What can I do for you?”

“Mr. Dobbs—Jonathan—wants to file a lawsuit against the people whose car collided with his. This fault was clearly the other party’s, so their insurance company is going to compensate Jonathan financially for the damage to his car. But the legal system is very conservative here in England. The physicians here have found him to be physically normal—his MRI is normal and there are no neurological symptoms or other injuries anywhere in his body. So the insurance company will only pay for the car damage, not for any health-related issues.”

“Well.”

“The problem, Dr. Ramachandran, is that he claims to have developed the Capgras syndrome. Even though he knows that he is looking at his wife, she often seems like a stranger, a new person. This is extremely troubling to him, and he wants to sue the other party for a million dollars for having caused a permanent neuropsychiatric disturbance.”

“Pray continue.”

“Soon after the accident someone found your book Phantoms in the Brain lying on my client’s coffee table. He admitted to reading it, which is when he realized he might have the Capgras syndrome. But this bit of self-diagnosis didn’t help him in any way. The symptoms remained just the same. So he and I want to sue the other party for a million dollars for having produced this permanent neurological symptom. He fears he may even end up divorcing his wife.

“The trouble is, Dr. Ramachandran, the other attorney is claiming that my client has simply fabricated the whole thing after reading your book. Because if you think about it, it’s very easy to fake the Capgras syndrome. Mr. Dobbs and I would like to fly you out to London so you can administer the GSR test and prove to the court that he does indeed have the Capgras syndrome, that he isn’t malingering. I understand you cannot fake this test.”

The attorney had done his homework. But I had no intention of flying to London just to administer this test.

“Mr. Watson, what’s the problem? If Mr. Dobbs finds that his wife looks like a new woman every time he sees her, he should find her perpetually attractive. This is a good thing—not bad at all. We should all be so lucky!” My only excuse for this tasteless joke is that I was still only barely awake.

There was a long pause at the other end and a click as he hung up on me. I never heard from him again. My sense of humor is not always well received.

Even though my remark may have sounded frivolous, it wasn’t entirely off the mark. There’s a well-known psychological phenomenon called the Coolidge effect, named after President Calvin Coolidge. It’s based on a little- known experiment performed by rat psychologists decades ago. Start with a sex-deprived male rat in a cage. Put a female rat in the cage. The male mounts the female, consummating the relationship several times until he collapses from sheer sexual exhaustion. Or so it would seem. The fun begins if you now introduce a new female into the cage. He gets going again and performs several times until he is once again thoroughly exhausted. Now introduce a third new female rat, and our apparently exhausted male rat starts all over again. This voyeuristic experiment is a striking demonstration of the potent effect of novelty on sexual attraction and performance. I have often wondered whether the effect is also true for female rats courting males, but to my knowledge that hasn’t been tried—probably because for many years most psychologists were men.

The story is told that President Coolidge and his wife were on a state visit to Oklahoma, and they were invited to a chicken coop—apparently one of their major tourist attractions. The president had to first give a speech, but since Mrs. Coolidge had already heard the speech many times she decided to go to the coop an hour earlier. She was being shown around by the farmer. She was surprised to see that the coop had dozens of hens but only one majestic rooster. When she asked the guide about this, he replied, “Well, he is a fine rooster. He goes on and on all night and day servicing the hens.”

“All night?” said Mrs. Coolidge. “Will you do me a big favor? When the president gets here, tell him in exactly the same words—what you just told me.”

An hour later when the president showed up, the farmer repeated the story.

The president asked, “Tell me something: Does the rooster go on all night with the same hen or different hens?”