Ben Underwood Clicks His Tongue To See

"To society he's blind," said Ben's mother, "but that doesn't make him handicapped. He just can't see."

She also said, "One thing that I truly get back from Ben being blind is that he truly sees people from within.

Blindsight: Graham Young Is Blind But Can See

What is consciousness? You may say that it is to be aware. But what does it mean to be consciously aware of something? I can type this paragraph while outside my window a bird chirps, shadows dapple the window ledge, and here, inside this room, my fingers move on the keyboard, music plays on the radio, and other events also happen as I focus only on these words. I stop for a moment, and there they are, all these other things. Then I return my attention to the computer screen. In a sense, I see but I don't see. I am aware but I am not aware. Things are part of consciousness and, so to speak, they are not.

Graham Young of Oxford, England is a case in point.

Wilder Penfield, Brain Maps, with V.S. Ramachandran and The Man Who Mistook His Foot For A Penis

Canadian neurosurgeon Wilder Penfield performed pioneering experiments in the 1940s and 1950s. During extensive brain surgeries, he applied electrodes to different regions of the brain and stimulated them. He then asked patients what they felt. He recorded and correlated sensations, images, even memories, as reported by the patients. By this means he mapped the brain and found, for example, that the brain area involved with lips and fingers occupies as much space as the area which handles the entire trunk of the body.

She Has No Fear, Which Is Dangerous

Near the opening of David Lean's epic movie, Lawrence of Arabia, we view Lawrence with non-coms in the mapping room of British HQ, Cairo, during WWI. As if damning the British class-system, Lieutenant Lawrence (Peter O'Toole) strikes a match to light a corporal's cigarette, then very slowly closes his finger and thumb upon the flame. His face is very attentive while the sergeant and corporal watch, fascinated, as Lawrence extinguishes the flame. The corporal then tries the trick with a burning match but drops it in pain. He complains that it hurts, to which Lawrence answers, "Certainly it hurts."

"Well what’s the trick then?" asks the corporal.

"The trick," says Lawrence, "is not minding if it hurts."

The scene serves as a metaphor of what neuroscience has learned about pain.

You're Not My Momma: Capgras Delusion

In a traffic accident, David Silvera was thrown from his car and landed on his head. He lay in a coma five weeks. When he awakened he discovered he lost the use of his right arm but felt he remained intact mentally. He kept his intelligence. He was not psychotic, not emotionally disturbed. He read the newspaper with interest and retained his curiosity about the world.

But then he started telling his mother she was an imposter, not his real mom. The same went for his father, who was no longer his real dad. It didn't stop there. The house he lived in was like his parents--just a good imitation of the real one. Not only that, David was not really David. He sometimes became the other David. He was his own imposter.

Amputating a Phantom Arm

You have lost your left arm but you still feel your left hand.  You not only feel it,
but every minute of the day you are are nagged by an exhausting need to scratch the hand. But there is nothing there to scratch.

How can this be?  You feel something in the middle of nothing but air. You look down and you see empty space, but you still feel an extremely annoying itch right there where your hand is supposed to be.

You have a problem and it looks like there is no way to solve it. You can't scratch something that does not exist.

Can the Brain Explain Your Mind? On V.S. Ramachandran

"Is studying the brain a good way to understand the mind? Does psychology stand to brain anatomy as physiology stands to body anatomy? In the case of the body, physiological functions—walking, breathing, digesting, reproducing, and so on—are closely mapped onto discrete bodily organs, and it would be misguided to study such functions independently of the bodily anatomy that implements them. If you want to understand what walking is, you should take a look at the legs, since walking is what legs do. Is it likewise true that if you want to understand thinking you should look at the parts of the brain responsible for thinking?

Cotard's Syndrome: The Walking Dead

So I am dead, see. Don't ask me how I can be writing this. You just have to understand that I am dead. The doctor says I suffer from Cotard's Delusion, but I know better. He's wrong. I'm dead. It is so clear to me, if not to him. This is real. He is deluded.

Such might be the response of a patient with Cotard's Syndrome, or Cotard's Delusion.

Wilder Penfield & Brain Maps, V.S. Ramachandran & Phantom Orgasms

Canadian neurosurgeon Wilder Penfield performed pioneering experiments in the 1940s and 1950s. During extensive brain surgeries, he applied electrodes to different regions of the brain and stimulated them. He then asked patients what they felt. He recorded and correlated sensations, images, even memories, as reported by the patients. By this means he mapped the brain and found, for example, that the brain area involved with lips and fingers occupies as much space as the area which handles the entire trunk of the body. Of course, the lips and fingers are highly sensitive, and such a large dedication of neuronal space helps explain why. Interestingly, he found that the areas did not always correspond to places on the body. The genital area is not on the brain next the area for thighs. Instead, it is located next the area for the feet. This is a fact that has far reaching implications for the account which follows.

V.S. Ramachandran, University of California, San Diego, received a call one day. An engineer from Arkansas wanted to talk about something that was puzzling. Here is the narrative:

"Is this Dr. Ramachandran?"

"Yes."

"You know, I read about your work in the newspaper, and it's really exciting. I lost my leg below the knee about two months ago but there's still something I don't understand. I'd like your advice."

"What's that?"

"Well, I feel a little embarrassed to tell you this."

I knew what he was going to say but . . . he didn't know about the Penfield map.

"Doctor, every time I have sexual intercourse, I experience sensations in my phantom foot. How do you explain that? My doctor said it doesn't make sense."

"Look," I said. "One possibility is that the genitals are right next to the foot in the body's brain maps. Don't worry about it."

He laughed nervously. "All that's fine, doctor. But you still don't understand. You see, I actually experience my orgasm in my foot. And therefore it's much bigger than it used to be because it's no longer just confined to my genitals."

Patients don't make up such stories. Ninety-nine percent of the time they're telling the truth, and if it seems incomprehensible, it's usually because we are not smart enough to figure out what's going on in their brains. This gentleman was telling me that he sometimes enjoyed sex more after his amputation. The curious implication is that it's not just the tactile sensation that transferred to his phantom but the erotic sensations of sexual pleasures as well. ( A colleague suggested I title this book "The Man Who Mistook His Foot For A Penis.") (From Phantoms In The Brain: Probing The Mysteries of The Human Mind, by V.S. Ramachandran and Sandra Blakeslee. NY: Quill (Harper Collins): 1998)

To read more on phantom limb syndrome read Silas Weir Mitchell: Civil War Amputees and Pain from Phantom Arms 22 June 2004, and the clever trick Ramachandran used to relieve an amputee of his phantom pain, 14 February 2012.

Charles Bonnet Syndrome & V.S. Ramachandran

The last moments happened in slow motion as the car collided in a sickening crunch. His head smashed into the windshield, fracturing the frontal bones above his eyes and the orbital plates protecting his optic nerves. He was comatose for two weeks until he woke up. When he did, he could not walk or talk. For Larry MacDonald that was just the beginning. When he opened his eyes he could not "distinguish what was real from what was fake." He looked at the doctors and nurses standing by his bed. Behind and next them stood football players while Hawaiian girls danced the hula, hips swaying gently. His head was flooded with voices. He couldn't tell who was saying what, nor where the voices came from. He was thrown into panic and confusion.

Weeks passed, then months, and years. Gradually, as he gained control over his body functions, as he learned to walk, he also began to distinguish real voices from the imaginary. It was tough going, and he was not the same, but he kept at it. Five years later, he met V.S. Ramachandran.

He no longer saw football players and hula dancers as he once did, but he still had visual problems. Visual hallucinations occurred where he was blind, which was in the lower half of his field of vision. Everything in the upper half was normal; the lower half presented strange things indeed.

Ramachandran asked him what he was seeing. He saw dogs and elephants as they spoke. A monkey was sitting on Ramachandran's lap.

Ramachandran asked him how he knew he was not hallucinating. MacDonald explained that it was highly unlikely that a professor would have a monkey with him. Nonetheless, the monkey was "extremely vivid and real." Larry knew it was not real because after a while the image faded. Here is a review of the book in which this is described, Phantoms in The Brain: Probing The Mysteries of The Human Mind.

Larry MacDonald was a victim of Charles Bonnet syndrome. First described by Charles Bonnet in 1769, and named after him, Charles Bonnet Syndrome (CBS) is a disease that causes patients to have complex visual hallucinations.

Its victims are mentally healthy people who have vivid, complex recurrent visual hallucinations. An occasional characteristic is that things seem much smaller or larger in relation to oneself. If things seem smaller, the viewer feels like a giant, and vice versa.

CBS tends to affect people in old age, particularly some people with visual damage such as macular degeneration. More here and here.

V.S. Ramachandran on God, the temporal lobes, and mystical experience.

Part 1. Subject as above.



Part 2. On emotional salience and religious or mystical experiences. Emotional reactions to moral atrocities committed to other people, and omnipotence. Are all brains wired for religious belief? Watch it here.

Blindsight: Graham Young Is Blind But Can See

What is consciousness? You may say that it is to be aware. But what does it mean to be consciously aware of something? I can type this paragraph while outside my window a bird chirps, shadows dapple the window ledge, and here, inside, my fingers move on the keyboard, music plays on the radio, and so many other events also happen as I focus only on these words. I stop for a moment, and there they are, all these other things. Then I return my attention to the computer screen. In a sense, I see but I don't see. I am aware but I am not aware. Things are part of consciousness and, so to speak, they are not.

Graham Young of Oxford, England is a case in point. When eight years old, he suffered a head injury that damaged the visual cortex of his hind brain, and this experience rendered him unable to see on his right hand side, while he can see on his left. This blindness affects both eyes.