From: J. R. Molloy (jr@shasta.com)
Date: Thu Oct 25 2001 - 18:18:04 MDT
From: "Brian Atkins" <brian@posthuman.com>
I was watching some PBS
> last night, and they were doing a piece on the guy who originally made
> the claims about a "God spot" in the brain
Secrets of the Mind
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/mind/
Dr. Vilayanur Ramachandran, an eloquent neuroscientist, is fascinated by
patients who have unusual abilities or defects in the way they perceive the
world. These include such puzzling phenomena as the phantom pain experienced
in a missing, amputated limb, or the inability to recognize a familiar face
following a stroke. From these strange cases, Ramachandran is building a novel
vision of how the brain works. In "Secrets of the Mind," NOVA dramatizes the
intimate stories of Ramachandran's encounters with his extraordinary patients.
Original broadcast date: 10/23/2001
Topics: medicine/disease & research, human biology/behavior
Hey Anders! Check this out. It's good stuff.
The non-introductory portions of this article were excerpted with permission
from Phantoms in the Brain: Probing the Mysteries of the Human Mind, by V.S.
Ramachandran and Sandra Blakeslee (Quill/William Morrow, 1998).
>From Ramachandran's Notebook
Vilayanur Ramachandran has been called a Sherlock Holmes of neuroscience.
Director of the Center for Brain and Cognition at the University of
California, San Diego, and adjunct professor at the Salk Institute for
Biological Studies in La Jolla, California, Ramachandran has brilliantly
sleuthed his way through some of the strangest maladies of the human mind. He
has done this by marrying simple tools such as mirrors and cotton swabs with
an insatiably inquisitive mind and a tonic sense of humor.
One of the areas in which he has made some of his greatest strides is in the
arena of phantom limbs, in which amputees and even those born without one or
more limbs feel pain and other sensations in their missing body parts. Here,
read Ramachandran's vivid descriptions of his experiences with phantom-limb
patients and how he has managed to understand their singular dilemmas and
thereby help them.
--- --- --- --- ---
Useless hypotheses, etc.:
consciousness, phlogiston, philosophy, vitalism, mind, free will, qualia,
analog computing, cultural relativism, GAC, Cyc, Eliza, cryonics, individual
uniqueness, ego, human values, scientific relinquishment
We move into a better future in proportion as science displaces superstition.
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