The Tell-Tale Brain

Title: The Tell-Tale Brain – Unlocking the Mystery of Human Nature

Author: V S Ramachandran

Publisher: Random House India 2012 (First published 2010)

ISBN: 9788184002072

Pages: 504

A rare work of erudition that elevates man out of the company of apes and establishes his uniqueness among all life forms, yet having solid foundation on true science.

V S Ramachandran is a distinguished professor and neuroscientist at the University of California, San Diego. He is best known for his experiments in behavioural neurology and has been called a latter-day Marco Polo by Richard Dawkins. He is a renowned author on neuroscience and is a recipient of India’s third-highest civilian award and honorific title: the Padma bhushan. In this book, Ramachandran narrates literally what goes on in the brain in our everyday lives. With inputs from his vast clinical experience, he tells about what goes wrong in the case of peculiar disorders of the brain. He does it in a careful way as to be comprehensible to lay readers, while at the same time not going down too low as to feel pedantic for those who have background knowledge. One fact that is clearly visible throughout the treatise is the amount of knowledge, or lack of it, that is accumulated over the years in the field. A neurologist is a person who can claim ignorance of many areas coming under his field of specialization, but can still get away with it. The purpose of the book is to expose the uniqueness of man among planetary life. Man owes his special status to his brain. Readers with special interest in the field will find this book to be of immense use in pursuing their aim further, while others get a sense of wonder at the literally mind-boggling aspects of the brain.

All books on the popular science genre treats man only as an advanced ape. Mere ape, as Ramachandran remarks sarcastically. The reason behind this forced mediocrity is that the creationists are breathing down their necks, constantly on the lookout for a slip of the tongue or an expression of wonder at man’s special powers which will then be blown out of all proportions as evidence for the biblical claim that God created man in his own likeness. That’s why popular authors invariably trumpeted man’s similarities with other apes at the risk of downplaying his unique characteristics. Ramachandran does a fine job of dispelling the notion of man’s humble pedigree. He takes the bull by its horns and categorically declare that man is unique and special. This book is a glorious narrative of the organ that makes man so outstanding – the brain. But he achieves this feat not by philosophical arguments alone. Quite fitting for a neuroscientist, he lists out several areas of the brain which are found only in humans. The Wernicke’s Area is seven times larger in man than in chimpanzees, which caters for comprehension of meaning and semantics of language. Similarly, the angular gyrus and the supramarginal gyrus are uniquely human (don’t ask me what they are, but the author knows it best). The greatest advantage of this book is its sole reliance on evolution as the route through which these peculiar features came to reside in our brains. It is often suggested that around 150,000 years ago, the human species’ speech and language skills experienced an explosive surge forward. Development of culture, civilization and science is rooted on this remarkable change which took place at that time. How can evolution, which operates through minor changes in each generation account for this sudden explosion of creativity? This is a tricky question, as even a tiny misstep or faltering would be construed as phenomena that can’t be explained by science by that horde of propagandists who go by the name of creationists or intelligent designers. Ramachandran states that even with minuscule amounts of change per generation, when these are accumulated in sufficient quantity to tilt a hypothetical balance in a new direction, such a rapid change is termed a ‘phase transition’. This defined a new paradigm that ushered in a strange new world that man ascended the ladder of progress with each passing generation until at last he wielded the power to destroy his own species.

‘Publish or Perish’ is a dictum ruling over the lives of research scholars. Even though this strictly means publication in peer-reviewed journals, catering to the general public doesn’t do any harm if the author is honest and the results genuine. Charlatans often bypass the peer review process and dive straight to the common pool where they can maintain a semblance of authenticity to their ideas which might not have any anchoring on facts. But Ramachandran is different and the pet ideas that are spawned from his painstaking research are presented in a lucid way. Synaesthesia, the peculiar disorder in which a person sees colour associated with a  number, sound or even an abstract concept is the author’s favourite. Some people visualize numbers with a colour tinged with it. Curiously, this disorder is said to be more pronounced in people having a strong bent to creativity, like artists, poets, or painters. The author has done extensive analyses of this trait and presents the results in a very simple way. It turns out that in those people’s brains, the areas that are responsible for differentiating numbers and colours have heavy crosswiring of neurons. These areas are adjacent too, resulting in cross talk between the regions and generating the illusion of seeing colour when it really is not there.

Language and art are exclusively human. No other animal has come anywhere near us in sharing these wonderful traits. Naturally this calls for the attention of neuroscientists to explain why. The author earmarks several chapters to illustrate his hypotheses and the logical conclusions that can be drawn from them. Readers readily agree with the propositions that are consistent and plausible. However, repeatability and falsifiability are two prime requirements for any scientific theory to hold its ground. The sample sizes of many of the tests actually conducted are very small, you can count them with the fingers of your hands! How can a theory be extrapolated for global significance when the number of people who had undergone testing is infinitesimally small? The author is not at fault here, as the disorder and its symptoms are so rare that it may take a lifetime of observation to arrive at a decent number of volunteers ready to undergo the rigorous examination. But when we move on to the realm of art, we get an impression that the narration is highly speculative and subjective. Ramachandran adores ancient Indian temple art and comes up with theories that purportedly prove that the abstract notions of aesthetics embedded in those sculptures follow universal rules of art propounded by the author himself. Educated Indians, who are otherwise normal, sometimes harbour illusions about the country’s great past that was imagined to be thriving with scientific knowledge and technological innovations that the West could catch up only in the post-Renaissance era. It is to be doubted that Ramachandran also entertains some minor illusions regarding ancient temple art – on a strict historical sense, his example sculptures are medieval rather than ancient, coming from the Late Chola and Khajuraho periods. In addition to the small number of test subjects, the results seem to be biased somewhat. A sketch of a prancing horse is shown on page 310 that are produced by a normal child, an autistic child and the great Leonardo da Vinci himself. It can be easily seen that the figure drawn by the normal child is very bland and hideous, while the picture made by the child with autism comes very close to the graphical richness attested by da Vinci’s. Then he goes on to argue that autism dulls many of the brain areas that control social interactions, but at the same time may enhance the regions dealing with art. This seems like jumping to conclusions, or at least may be thought of as not proved by the examples cited. How can you conclude that all normal children would draw in such an uninspired way or that all autistic children would come up with prized art?

The book is very stimulating and easily readable in the first half of it, but not particularly so in the second. While the author has maintained the right balance between hard to grasp neurological terms in the earlier half, he has shed all such inhibitions of keeping a check on outlandish names later on in the book. The most trying chapter is the last one, of course. However, the narrative is very witty and some of it very pointed indeed. The text eminently does its duty to grab the attention of its readers. Illustrating important concepts with the help of case studies is a potent combination to guarantee readers’ interest riveting on to it. There is a fine glossary and an extensive index which is grouped according to topic and we sometimes find it to be not much useful for looking up a word in a hurry.

The book is highly recommended.

Rating: 4 Star