Science and Inquiry discussion

Our group read selection for January 2012 is The Tell-Tale Brain: A Neuroscientist's Quest for What Makes Us Human.

You can use this thread to post questions, reviews, and discussions at any time.

I just bought this on Kindle from Amazon for $9.93 (prices sometimes change daily).

I'm only 10% into it but thus far it is smooth and pleasant reading. There is a problem with the Kindle version in that the labels on the brain diagram are in many cases too small and distorted to be read. Fortunately there is an easy and excellent solution to this problem.

The website below provides outstanding, rotatable, 3D
images of the brain and each of its sub-structures along with explanations of function and links to studies related to that particular area. This site would be of benefit even to readers of the hardcover edition:

http://www.g2conline.org/2022

I just started reading this book--it is excellent. Who else is reading it? What are your impressions so far?

I can't afford the book and tend to read journal articles. I worked as a neuroscientist for 20 years and so can contribute to the discussions for specific issues. Hopefully, Jim will too.

I am almost finished with the book--and it is still engrossing. A big reason seems to be that it was written by a neuroscientist who is an active researcher in the field. His deep understanding of the subject, and his enthusiasm really shine through.

I finished the book, finally--it is brilliant. I hope that more people read it, because it is entertaining and very informative. Here is my review.

Love your rave review. But now you have to share more. :-)

I would like to hear more about these threads:
"Ramachandran shows how important mirror neurons are, in making us "human". He explains why they evolved in our brains, and how central the feeling of empathy is to human survival." Just telling us what a mirror neuron system is and briefly why it may elucidate empathy would be a boon here to start with.

I was astounded by the discovery of mirror neurons at the time by Gross and am blown away with now decades later all the implications that have evolved from the discovery and tools now used to get past the inability to do single cell recording in humans. Ferment in the field points to how the mirror neuron system can help understand social learning, language, music, our ability to comprehand another's mind and intentions, and clues to therapy for communication disorders in autism and schizophrenia.

If people on this site can't read the book, a quick read of a review could provide a basis to draw you out on this great author's perspectives. Right now this review looks promising for that: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/artic...

This author tries to address challeges of the theory for development, correspondence, and control issues. He poses these questions:
Developmentally, the question is how does a mirroring system arise? How do humans acquire the ability to simulate through mapping observed onto executed actions? Are mirror neurons innate and therefore genetically programmed? To what extent is learning necessary? In terms of the correspondence problem, the question is how does the observer agent know what the observed agent's resonance activation pattern is? How does the matching of motor activation patterns occur? Finally, in terms of the control problem, the issue is how to efficiently control a mirroring system when it is turned on automatically through observation? Or, as others have stated the problem more succinctly: "Why don't we imitate all the time?"

I would love to see average readers learn something about mirror neurons and empathy and feel that their common sense is adequate to critique or approve of claims. I am of the school that neuroscientists are just scratching the surface of understanding and well deserve being help up to bullshit detectors of the average person. That some brain systems are active in a similar way during perception of an action as during its execution may raise more questions than it really answers. But better questions represents some progress.

That review would not be accessible to average readers but I figured the questions would be.

A Scientific American interview with a key researcher in the field is a lot more comprehensible:
http://www.scientificamerican.com/art...

Here is the basic concept for how the mirror neuron system helps get a handle on empathy:
"When I see you smiling, my mirror neurons for smiling fire up, too, initiating a cascade of neural activity that evokes the feeling we typically associate with a smile. I don’t need to make any inference on what you are feeling, I experience immediately and effortlessly (in a milder form, of course) what you are experiencing."

He goes on to note how work with people with autism suggest their problems with making sense of what others are feeling could relate to deficiencies with this system. Interestingly, in Levitan's book
This is Your Brain on Music he notes that many autistics have a knack for understanding music, which research depends a lot on the mirror neuron system (i.e. hearing music activates in musicians the same circuits that playing music does). Some feel that music therapy could provide a good handle to help autistics.

The interview in the Sci. Amer. article also raises the issue of how experiencing violence through media could have negative consequences: "Mirror neurons provide a plausible neurobiological mechanism that explains why being exposed to media violence leads to imitative violence."

Wondering if Ramachandran covers these topics.

Michael wrote: "The interview in the Sci. Amer. article also raises the issue of how experiencing violence through media could have negative consequences: "Mirror neurons provide a plausible neurobiological mechanism that explains why being exposed to media violence leads to imitative violence."

Wondering if Ramachandran covers these topics."

Michael, I didn't think that he did but I searched the book for the word 'violence' using my Kindle's search feature, and, amazingly, there were zero instances where he used that word.

I enjoyed the first half of the book where he describes: how various brain abnormalities, caused by injury or disease, can be used to learn about how the human brain works; how his low-tech experiments and treatments sometimes answered questions that the latest scanning technology could not; how his studies of synesthetes, those who associate numbers with colors revealed that possible “cross-wiring” between the sections of the brains for processing these different phenomena could be the cause. These were all fascinating.

I found the the latter half of the book where he delves into language, aesthetics and art to be less interesting, more speculative, and less compelling based on the evidence he provides.

Phantoms of the Brain is one of my all time favorite books. I pre-ordered The Tell Tale Brain but when I started reading it it seemed very similar to things that he had previously covered. If anyone has read his other works can you let me know if there is new stuff in this one and worth going forward? For example he talked about Synesthesia in A Brief Tour of Human Consciousness, Fantom Limbs and Anosignosia in Phantoms in the Brain etc. It feels like the only thing that is "new" is the mirror neuron system which I'm not entirely sold on anyways. Also from reading the previous books I like when he supports this theories with the interesting cases but agree with Steve he sometimes goes into more speculative topics which are indeed less interesting.