Summary of Lecture #1 and road map to understand it

Disclaimer: The summary posted in this blog is soley based on Dr.V.Ramachandran's first lectures in his series of BBC Reith lectures titled "Phantoms in the brain".

Salient Features:

The main theme of the lecture is understanding the functions of the parts of the brain by exploring various brain syndromes. This is facilitated by the fortunate fact that patients having syndromes bear leisons in specific parts of the brain with all other parts intact. By studying the peculiar behavior of the patient with a specific syndrome, one can reason out the function of that specific part of the brain. This is the main approach explained in this lecture.

Towards understanding of the various syndromes to be enumerated below with their broad definition, one must have thorough understanding of the basic fundamental unit of the brain, which is neuron, and the basic anatomy of the brain.

As a note: In the following posts, i will be exploring more about neurons and anatomy of the brain to grasp the following syndromes pointed out in this lecture.

Brain Syndromes:

#1) Prosopognosia or face blindness:

As the non-scientific name suggests, people having this syndrome cannot recognize faces of the people. This does not mean that these patients are blind. Even though they can visualize everything, they cannot recognize faces.

This syndrome leads to more fundamental discussion of vision. what is the process of vision? Praphrasing the same question, what are the complex series of events a brain undergoes for a human being to visualize things in everyday life which is taken for granted as a trivial task.

We will discuss abbout the process of vision in the coming posts.

#2) Capgras Syndrome:

This is quite an bizarre syndrome. Patients having this syndrome can very well recognize faces but CANNOT attach any emotional significance to that visual image. Quoting the same instance in the lecture, the patient upon seeing his mother can recognize that she is her mother but still not sure that she is as he could not feel any love and warmth which are associated with mother.

This syndrome leads to a very interesting discussion of how art is appreciated. How do people appreciate beauty?. For instance, different people have idiosyncratic measures of appreciating beauty of a woman, lets say, some get the emotion of infactuation upon seeing a woman with good superficial features (despite the fact that definition of 'good' is relativistic to the persons nutured opinions) even though she is perfect candidate for a devil.

#3) Phantom Limbs

The vivid feeling of an amputed limb by the patient is termed as phantom limb. He explores why does this happen?. The answer is explained based on brain maps being crosswired. We will discuss about this more after we have learned more about brain maps.

But the main consequential inference from the study of phantom limbs was rebuttal of the traditional notion that once the brain is developed in the feotus, it does not change over time. In other words, there is no possibility of plasticity in brain. He explains most fascinating exploitation of the discovery that brain indeed does undergo plasticity in curing patients to recover of stroke.

#4) Synesthesia

One of the most common and intersting syndrome is synesthesia. It is caused by mixing up of senses. Seeing colors when listening to specific tones like c# is red, F# is yellow. And also visual images of numbers are also associated with certain colors. This is again explained by crosswiring in the brain maps. We will explore this more after learning about brain maps.

The more interesting impact in understanding this syndrome is being able to find as explanation to the evolution of language. This is dealt in detail by Dr. Ramachandran in his other lectures. Let save this after we thoroughly understand this lecture.

#5) Pain Asymbolia

A patient with this syndrome laughs uncontrollable when inflicted by pain even though he can feel the pain. In his discussion, he lead to a most basic question that why do anybody laugh?. What is the definiton of laughter? What are the series events in the brain which lead to laughter?

These are syndromes talked about in the lecture #1. As a road map to understand this lecture #1:

1) Brain Anatomy
2) Brain Maps

Interested people can start discussion on these topics.