If you remember (from RC 1st session), before reading any non-fiction book, we’re first supposed to preview it. Here’s a brief summary of how to preview a book:
Title / Sub-title (if any)
Blurb (behind or inside left of the cover)
Preface / Introduction
Table of Contents:
Index
Browse for anything that strikes our, e.g. Figures, tables, pictures, sub-headings, things written in bold, etc.
Last paragraphs of three to four chapters.
Last 1 or 2 chapters.
Title:
The title of the book under discussion is The Tell-Tale Brain. Tell-tale means: revealing, indicating, or betraying something. And the subtitle is Unlocking The Mystery Of Human Nature. So we can take a guess that the book is about how the brain reveals aspects of human nature.
Blurb:
In the blurb (behind the book), some of the sentences are:
Eminent neuroscientist Professor V.S. Ramachandran takes us on a fascinating journey into the human brain, studying patients who exhibit bizarre symptoms, and using them to understand the functions of the normal brain. Along the way he asks big questions: How did abstract thinking evolve? What is art? Why do we laugh? How are these hardwired in the neural mechanisms of the human brain, and why did they evolve?
This tells us the kind of questions the book is going to answer.
Preface:
The very first paragraph of the preface tells us so much about this book:
This book is a distillation of a large chunk of my life’s work, which has been to unravel—strand by elusive strand—the mysterious connections between brain, mind, and body.
In the chapters ahead I recount my investigations of various aspects of our inner mental life that we are naturally curious about. How do we perceive the world? What is the so-called mind-body connection? What determines your sexual identity? What is consciousness? What goes wrong in autism? How can we account for all of those mysterious faculties that are so quintessentially human, such as art, language, metaphor, creativity, self-awareness, and even religious sensibilities?
Think about it. If someone were to ask you what this book was about, and you just said the aforementioned sentences, wouldn’t the questioner feel that you’ve actually gotten a lot out of the book? Be that as it may, the 1st para distills the essence of the book in a few sentences. You should be thankful to the author for helping you so much.
Another thing: this also tells us how the author is going to write the rest of the book. Trying to guide us and walking alongside us. Holding our hand, as it were. That should encourage you to read the book. You can be sure that you won’t be staring in space!
The next paragraph tells us the author’s methods:
My approach to these questions has been to study patients with damage or genetic quirks in different parts of their brains that produce bizarre effects on their minds or behavior.
In this book I describe what I have learned from these cases. Disorders like these are always baffling at first, but thanks to the magic of the scientific method we can render them comprehensible by doing the right experiments.
This is very similar to what we’ve already learned from the blurb.
Then he goes on to talk about the history of his field.
Page xv has this heading called: Overview. That’s as big a clue as any. In this section, Ramachandran is going to tell us an overview or outline of his book. If you read this carefully, you’ll figure what the author is going to talk about in this book and how. If you take a cursory glance at the overview, you’ll see chapter 1 written here, chapter 2 written there and so on. Wow! he’s actually telling us what each chapter is about. Remember what I said about this author holding our hand. Let’s get on with it.
Ramachandran starts the overview by telling us that there are some important themes that this book has:
One is that humans are truly unique and special, not “just” another species of primate.
The next para begins:
Another common thread is a pervasive evolutionary perspective. It is impossible to understand how the brain works without also understanding how it evolved.
Next para begins:
You will see me arguing that many of our unique mental traits seem to have evolved through the novel deployment of brain structures that originally evolved for other reasons.
Next para:
And so this book is my modest contribution to the grand attempt to crack the code of the human brain, with its myriad connections and modules that make it infinitely more enigmatic than any Enigma machine.
So these are the themes that will run across the “wide spectrum of topic” that this book will cover.
The very next sentence says:
The Introduction offers perspectives and history on the uniqueness of the human mind, and also provides a quick primer on the basic anatomy of the human brain.
Alright, so this is what the introduction (the 1st chapter) is going to focus on. Hmmm, not bad. He goes on to tell us that:
Chapter 1 highlights the human brain’s amazing capacity for change and reveals how a more expanded form of plasticity may have shaped the course of our evolutionary and cultural development.
Chapter 2 explains how the brain processes incoming sensory information, visual information in particular.
Chapter 3 deals with an intriguing phenomenon called synesthesia, a strange blending of the senses that some people experience as a result of unusual brain wiring.T
The next triad of chapters investigates a type of nerve cell that I argue is especially crucial in making us human.
Chapter 4 introduces these special cells, called mirror neurons, which lie at the heart of our ability to adopt each other’s point of view and empathize with one another.
Chapter 5 explores how problems with the mirror-neuron system may underlie autism, a developmental disorder characterized by extreme mental aloneness and social detachment.
Chapter 6 explores how mirror neurons may have also played a role in humanity’s crowning achievement, language.
Chapters 7 and 8 move on to our species’ unique sensibilities about beauty. I suggest that there are laws of aesthetics that are universal …
In the final chapter I take a stab at the most challenging problem of all, the nature of self-awareness, which is undoubtedly unique to humans.
The remaining overview is more details.
The section titled Boyhood Seductions is the author’s biographical info in his own words.
Table of Contents:
To be honest, we can actually skip this because the overview, in preface, was so awesome. But just for info:
PREFACE
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
INTRODUCTION NO MERE APE
CHAPTER 1 PHANTOM LIMBS AND PLASTIC BRAINS
CHAPTER 2 SEEING AND KNOWING
CHAPTER 3 LOUD COLORS AND HOT BABES: SYNESTHESIA
CHAPTER 4 THE NEURONS THAT SHAPED CIVILIZATION
CHAPTER 5 WHERE IS STEVEN? THE RIDDLE OF AUTISM
CHAPTER 6 THE POWER OF BABBLE: THE EVOLUTION OF LANGUAGE
CHAPTER 7 BEAUTY AND THE BRAIN: THE EMERGENCE OF AESTHETICS
CHAPTER 8 THE ARTFUL BRAIN: UNIVERSAL LAWS
CHAPTER 9 AN APE WITH A SOUL: HOW INTROSPECTION EVOLVED
EPILOGUE
GLOSSARY
NOTES
BIBLIOGRAPHY
ILLUSTRATION CREDITS
Index:
As you may recall, the index of a book tells us what are the important terms and names as far as this book is concerned. What things has the author focused more on. This can be easily figured by seeing which terms, concepts or names have more reference page numbers than others. In The Tell-Tale Brain… some of these important terms or names you might have seen are:
Note: There’s a problem with the index of this book. The sub-categories, which belong to one umbrella term, are aligned similar to the main term, unlike the usual little to the right. This makes it slightly cumbersome and irritating. But what to do?
Action aesthetics amygdala
angular gyrus Anterior cingulate art
Autism autonomic nervous system
Biology body image brain, human
Brain damage cerebellum colour
consciousness Creativity emotions
Empathy evolution, human faces
Frontal lobes genetics language
pain primates Self-awareness
Stroke synaesthesia vision
Browsing:
Remember this is a random process. There is no method to this. You just have to browse (flip, if you like) and stop at whatever strikes your attention. Anything. Then figure out what it’s about and move on. I’ll tell you what I came across during my browsing. For example on pg. 20 I found this:
FIGURE INT.2 The human brain viewed from the top and from the left side. The top view shows the two mirror-symmetric cerebral hemispheres, each of which controls the movements of—and receives signals from—the opposite side of the body (though there are some exceptions to this rule). Abbreviations: DLF, dorsolateral prefrontal cortex; OFC, orbitofrontal cortex; IPL, inferior parietal lobule; I, insula, which is tucked away deep beneath the Sylvian fissure below the frontal lobe. The ventromedial prefrontal cortex (VMF, not labeled) is tucked away in the inner lower part of the frontal lobe, and the OFC is part of it.
If you read the caption of this image you’ll notice that the sentence “the two mirror-symmetric cerebral hemispheres, each of which controls the movements of—and receives signals from—the opposite side of the body” tells us something important about how our brain works.
FIGURE 2.1 Skeleton outline drawing of a cube: You can see it in either of two different ways, as if it were above you or below you.
There were two things that struck me when I saw this. One was a feeling of wow! This is amazing. Another was that I was able to relate this to my previous experience of visual illusions that I had read elsewhere. This is what reading is all about. We have this huge database of information from all sorts of areas. Any new information either fits in a file that’s already there or it creates a new file or a folder.
These two were examples from my browsing. Obviously, you’d have figured many more.
Conclusions of few chapters:
This also has be a totally random step. There is no method to this. You read the concluding paragraphs of chapters at random or of the ones that intrigue you – for whatever reason. I did it at random. Here’s what I found:
Chapter 2: Phantom Limbs and Plastic Brains
And so it is that we can begin with a bizarre mystery that could have come straight from Edgar Allan Poe, apply Sherlock Holmes’s methods, diagnose and explain Mikhey’s symptoms, and, as a bonus, illuminate the possible evolution and biological function of a much treasured but deeply enigmatic aspect of the human mind.
This can be a little tricky as you need to know Edgar Allan Poe and/or the methods of Sherlock Holmes. As it happens, I know both. Poe wrote mystery, detective and horror tales. Sherlock Holmes, in the stories, used to solve mysteries and cases by a step by step method of deduction. We have done deductive logic in the class.
So here, I can guess that just like the stories of Poe, there are mysteries to the brain or mind (obviously) and Ramachandran and his colleagues have solved some aspect of the mysteries of the mind or brain by using methods similar to Sherlock Holmes.
Chapter 4: The Neurons That Shaped Civilization
A caveat is in order. I am not arguing that mirror neurons are sufficient for the great leap or for culture in general. I’m only saying that they played a crucial role. Someone has to discover or invent something—like noticing the spark when two rocks are struck together—before the discovery can spread. My argument is that even if such accidental innovations were hit upon by chance by individual early hominins, they would have fizzled out were it not for a sophisticated mirror-neuron system. After all, even monkeys have mirror neurons, but they are not bearers of a proud culture. Their mirror-neuron system is either not advanced enough or is not adequately connected to other brain structures to allow the rapid propagation of culture. Furthermore, once the propagation mechanism was in place, it would have exerted selective pressure to make some outliers in the population more innovative. This is because innovations would only be valuable if they spread rapidly. In this respect, we could say mirror neurons served the same role in early hominin evolution as the Internet, Wikipedia, and blogging do today. Once the cascade was set in motion, there was no turning back from the path to humanity.
This tells us that, according to the author, the mirror neurons have played a crucial role in the spread of ideas. This led to “leaps” in progress, whether technological or cultural. Compare this with what the author has said about each chapter in the preface: Chapter 4 introduces these special cells, called mirror neurons, which lie at the heart of our ability to adopt each other’s point of view and empathize with one another.
Chapter 5 explores how problems with the mirror-neuron system may underlie autism, a developmental disorder characterized by extreme mental aloneness and social detachment.
Chapter 6 explores how mirror neurons may have also played a role in humanity’s crowning achievement, language.
This tells us that mirror neurons have a crucial role to play in this book.
You can do this for one or two more chapters to get a rough idea of what kind of things are being discussed in this book and what kind of conclusions are being made.
Last Chapter/s:
The best part of this book is that it has an epilogue, which normally is a rahash or a conclusion. Since it is not very long, you can read it full. It neatly summarizes the main points in the book.
Here’s how it begins:
ONE OF THE MAJOR THEMES IN THE BOOK—WHETHER TALKING about body image, mirror neurons, language evolution, or autism—has been the question of how your inner self interacts with the world (including the social world) while at the same time maintaining its privacy. The curious reciprocity between self and others is especially well developed in humans and probably exists only in rudimentary form in the great apes. I have suggested that many types of mental illness may result from derangements in this equilibrium. Understanding such disorders may pave the way not only for solving the abstract (or should I say philosophical) problem of the self at a theoretical level, but also for treating mental illness.
And here’s how it ends:
As a scientist, I am one with Darwin, Gould, Pinker, and Dawkins. I have no patience with those who champion intelligent design, at least not in the sense that most people would use that phrase. No one who has watched a woman in labor or a dying child in a leukemia ward could possibly believe that the world was custom crafted for our benefit. Yet as human beings we have to accept—with humility—that the question of ultimate origins will always remain with us, no matter how deeply we understand the brain and the cosmos that it creates.
Make your own conclusions about what this means.
Please contribute to this in any way you can.
What else did you find out in any of the steps of the preview?
Is there anything you would want to add or subtract from this essay?
Can you come up with other interesting or important things that you learned from the intro?