A Brief Tour of Human Consciousness

http://www.amazon.com/Brief-Tour-Human-Consciousness-Impostor/dp/0131872788/ref=asap_bc?ie=UTF8

I need to do a better job of keeping my Blog up to date with my reading. I have a tendency to read a book, be excited about the next book, and rather than taking the time to make a few notes in the Blog, I start reading again. I recently finished the subject book by V. S. Ramachandran. It is a very short book, and quite accessible for books on the subject. The main assertion is that by taking detailed looks at small unusual brain syndromes we can come to a better understanding of standard brain mechanisms, including those that give rise to consciousness.

There is a condition called “Capgras Delusion” where the patient thinks their mother is an imposter. It can also happen with other people or even pets, but the specific initial case involved the mother. What is happened seems to be that the linkage of emotional content to the face has been lost. There is a place in your brain called the Fusiform Gyrus that recognizes “objects” including faces, but this has to be linked to “emotional content” in the Amygdala for you to “feel it is your mother”.

There are a number of examples like this discussed … phantom limbs, and his favorite, synesthesia, a condition where the senses are mingled. A musical note might be perceived as a color, or the number 5 may be seen as red and the number 6 green. It turns out that this kind of cross-wiring is quite common, as much as one in two hundred people, and seven times more common in artists.

He hangs quite a lot on synesthesia, including the development of language, long a mystery to strong materialists and evolutionists. He asserts that there is enough “standard cross wiring” in all of us so that there are “basic connections” that all peoples have built off to create language from grunts, groans, squeals, etc. One has to admire the level of faith that very intelligent people will go to in order to avoid the idea that there is some “intelligent design” in the universe. As Luther said, humans are creatures of worship, so we worship something. Ramachandran has a firm faith in the god of randomness.

There is a fun chapter on art that attempts to create 10 universal laws of art: Peak Shift, Grouping, Contrast, Isolation, Perceptual Problem Solving, Symmetry, Abhorrence of coincidence, Repetition-Rhythm-orderliness, balance and Metaphor. I won’t go into them all, but for someone not very adept at understanding art, it was an interesting set of ideas. The artist is executing “the lie that revels the truth” (Picasso). By causing our brains to fire in ways that a “faithful reproduction” of what the artist is trying to get across, the artist creates a work that is “more faithful than nature” in conveying the information to a HUMAN brain.

The book ends up with a series of discussions of consciousness, this time led off with a condition called Cotard’s syndrome where the patient claims to be dead. In this case the vision centers have been cut off from ALL emotional content, so the patient has no feelings of anything around them. Interestingly such patients are very resistant to intellectual correction. Once such a delusional model has developed the connection (or lack of) to emotion seems to prevent then from seeing the reality that others can see. Somewhat like trying to talk your best friend out of marrying their 3rd alcoholic spouse it would seem.

Maybe the reason that I don’t get around to putting all the books in is because I write too much! All in all a very good little book on the subject, interesting, well written, and highly recommended.