I suggest that a new set of brain structures evolved during hominid evolution, turning the output from more primitive sensory areas of the brain into what I call a “meta- representation” I think they edited, enhanced and packaged sensory information into more manageable chunks, used for juggling symbols and language.
Ramachandran is director of the Center for Brain and Cognition at the University of California, San Diego.
A piece of your brain the size of a grain of sand would contain one hundred thousand neurons, two million axons and one billion synapses, all "talking to" each other.
Pain is an opinion on the organism's state of health rather than a mere reflective response to an injury. There is no direct hotline from pain receptors to "pain centers" in the brain.
Your own body is a phantom, one that your brain has temporarily constructed purely for convenience.
The mechanisms of perception are mainly involved in extracting statistical correlations from the world to create a model that is temporarily useful.
One could argue that the term consciousness doesn't mean anything unless you recognize the emotional significance and semantic associations of what you are looking at.
We have given up the idea that there is a soul separate from our minds and bodies.
Every medical student is taught that patients with epileptic seizures originating in this part of the brain [temporal lobes] can have intense, spiritual experiences during the seizures and sometimes become preoccupied with religion and moral issues even during the seizure-free or interictal periods.
But most remarkable of all are those patients who have deeply moving spiritual experiences, including a feeling of divine presence and the sense that they are in direct communion with God. Everything around them is imbued with cosmic significance. They may say, "I finally understand what it's all about. This is the moment I've been waiting for all my life. Suddenly it all makes sense." Or, "Finally have insight into the true nature of the cosmos." I find it ironic that this sense of enlightenment, this absolute conviction that Truth is revealed at last, should derive from limbic structures concerned with emotions rather than from the thinking, rational parts of the brain that take so much pride in their ability to discern truth and falsehood.
Could it be that human beings have actually evolved specialized neural circuitry for the sole purpose of mediating religious experience? The human belief in the supernatural is so widespread in all societies all over the world that it's tempting to ask whether the propensity for such beliefs might have a biological basis.
What would happen to the patient's personality-- especially his spiritual leanings-- if we removed a chunk of his temporal lobe?
The one clear conclusion that emerges from all this is that there are circuits in the human brain that are involved in religious experience and these become hyperactive in some epileptics.
It's probably not coincidence that many of the most creative scientists have a great sense of humor.
[P]erhaps it's time to recognize that the division between mind and body may be no more than a pedagogic device for instructing medical students-- and not a useful construct for understanding human health, disease and behavior.
This need to reconcile the first-person and third-person accounts of the universe (the "I" verses the "he" or "it" view) is the single most important unsolved problem in science.
For centuries philosophers have assumed that this gap between brain and mind poses a deep epistemological problem-- a barrier that simply cannot be crossed. But is this really true? I agree that the barrier hasn't yet been crossed, but does it follow that it can never be crossed? I'd like to argue that there is in fact no such barrier, no great vertical divide in nature between mind and matter, substance and spirit. Indeed, I believe that this barrier is only apparent that is arises as a result of language. This sort of obstacle emerges when there is any translation from one language to another.
I submit that we are dealing here with two mutually unintelligible languages. One is the language of nerve impulses-- the spatial and temporal patterns of neuronal activity that allow us to see red, for example. The second language, the one that allows us to communicate what we are seeing to others, is a natural spoken tongue like English or German or Japanese-- rarefied, compressed waves of air traveling between you and the listener. Both are languages in the strict technical sense, that is, they are information-rich messages that are intended to convey meaning, across synapses between different brain parts in one case and across the air between two people in the other.
If one enumerates all of the attributes that we usually associate with the words "consciousness" and "awareness," each of them, you will notice, has a correlate in temporal lobe seizures, including vivid visual and auditory hallucinations, "out of body" experiences and an absolute sense of omnipotence or omniscience.
CONTENTS
Foreword by Oliver Sacks, M.D.
Preface
Chapter 1: The Phantom Within
Chapter 2: "Knowing Where to Scratch"
Chapter 3: Chasing the Phantom
Chapter 4: The Zombie in the Brain
Chapter 5: The Secret Life of James Thurber
Chapter 6: Through the Looking Glass
Chapter 7: The Sound of One Hand Clapping
Chapter 8: "The Unbearable Likeness of Being"
Chapter 9: God and the Limbic System
Chapter 10: The Woman Who Died Laughing
Chapter 11: "You Forgot to Deliver the Twin"
Chapter 12: Do Martians See Red?
