| Ramachandran; A Brief Tour of Human Consciousness | |||||
| Book | Page | Topic | |||
| Ramachandran; Brief Tour Consciousness | 1 | Most of our behavior is governed by a cauldron of motives and emotions of which we are barely conscious. | |||
| Ramachandran; Brief Tour Consciousness | 2 | The human brain has been said to be the most complexly organized structure in the universe. | 1 | ||
| Ramachandran; Brief Tour Consciousness | 5 | Prosopognosia, or face blindness -- when a structure called the fusiform gyrus in the temporal lobes is damaged on both sides of the brain, the patient can no longer recognize people's faces. | 3 | ||
| Ramachandran; Brief Tour Consciousness | 8 | When an image is recognized by the fusiform gyrus, a message is relayed to the amygdala, sometimes called the gateway to the limbic system, which allows you to gauge the emotional significance of what you're looking at. | 3 | ||
| Ramachandran; Brief Tour Consciousness | 9 | A pathway, separate from vision, leads from the auditory cortex in the superior temporal gyrus to the amygdala. | 1 | ||
| Ramachandran; Brief Tour Consciousness | 9 | Auditory cognition can remain intact when visual cognizance has been damaged. | 0 | ||
| Ramachandran; Brief Tour Consciousness | 9 | The emotional response to visual images is vital to our survival. | 0 | ||
| Ramachandran; Brief Tour Consciousness | 10 | What is Art? How does the brain respond to beauty? Given that these connections are between vision and emotion, and that art involves an aesthetic emotional response to visual images, surely the connections between vision and emotion must be involved. | 1 | ||
| Ramachandran; Brief Tour Consciousness | 12 | Touch signals from the entire skin surface on the left side of the body are mapped onto the right cerebral hemisphere on a vertical strip of cortical tissue called the postcentral gyrus. | 2 | ||
| Ramachandran; Brief Tour Consciousness | 14 | Connections in the brain are laid down in the fetus or in early infancy, and once they are laid down, there is nothing much that can be done to change these connections in an adult. | 2 | ||
| Ramachandran; Brief Tour Consciousness | 15 | Windows damage to the nervous system, such as caused by stroke, there is so little coverage of function. | 1 | ||
| Ramachandran; Brief Tour Consciousness | 15 | Neurological ailments are notoriously difficult to treat. | 0 | ||
| Ramachandran; Brief Tour Consciousness | 19 | Color information is analyzed in the fusiform gyrus. The number area of the brain, which represents visual graphemes of numbers, is also in a fusiform gyrus. | 4 | ||
| Ramachandran; Brief Tour Consciousness | 19 | Synesthesia is caused by cross wiring between the number and color areas in the pews of form gyrus due to an inherited genetic abnormality. | 0 | ||
| Ramachandran; Brief Tour Consciousness | 21 | Why does anybody laugh? Clearly, laughter is hardwired, it is a trait in all humans. | 2 | ||
| Ramachandran; Brief Tour Consciousness | 21 | The common denominator of all jokes is a path of expectation that is diverted by an unexpected twist necessitating a complete reinterpretation of all the previous facts -- the punch line. | 0 | ||
| Ramachandran; Brief Tour Consciousness | 21 | Reinterpretation alone in a joke is insufficient. The new model must be inconsequential. | 0 | ||
| Ramachandran; Brief Tour Consciousness | 22 | Suggestion that the rhythmic staccato sound of laughter evolved to inform our kin who share our genes: don't waste your precious resources on this situation; it's a false alarm. Laughter is nature's OK signal. | 1 | ||
| Ramachandran; Brief Tour Consciousness | 22 | The insular cortex receives pain signals from the viscera and from the skin. That's where the raw sensation of pain is experienced. | 0 | ||
| Ramachandran; Brief Tour Consciousness | 22 | But they are many layers to pain -- from the insular cortex, the message goes to the amygdala, and then to the rest of the limbic system, especially the anterior cingulate, where we respond emotionally to the pain and take appropriate action. | 0 | ||
| Ramachandran; Brief Tour Consciousness | 23 | The brain can ask questions about itself -- Who am I.? What is the meaning of my existence? Why do I laugh? Why do I dream? Why do I enjoy art, music and pull it straight? Does I mind consist entirely of the activity of neurons in my brain? | 1 | ||
| Ramachandran; Brief Tour Consciousness | 25 | V4 is the color area; MT is the motion area. | 2 | ||
| Ramachandran; Brief Tour Consciousness | 26 | If area V4 is damaged on both sides of the brain, a syndrome called cortical colorblindness or acromatopsia results. | 1 | ||
| Ramachandran; Brief Tour Consciousness | 26 | Patients with acromatopsia see the world in shades of gray, like a black-and-white film, but they have no problem reading a newspaper or recognizing people's faces or seeing direction of movement. | 0 | ||
| Ramachandran; Brief Tour Consciousness | 26 | If MT, the middle temporal area, is damaged, the patient can still read books and see colors but can't tell which direction something is moving, or how fast. | 0 | ||
| Ramachandran; Brief Tour Consciousness | 26 | Although the anatomy of the 30 visual areas in the brain seems overwhelming, there is an overall plan of organization. | 0 | ||
| Ramachandran; Brief Tour Consciousness | 26 | The message from the retina goes through the optic nerve to two major visual centers in the brain. | 0 | ||
| Ramachandran; Brief Tour Consciousness | 26 | The evolutionary ancient pathway includes the superior colliculus in the brainstem. | 0 | ||
| Ramachandran; Brief Tour Consciousness | 26 | The new pathway goes to the visual cortex in the back of the brain. | 0 | ||
| Ramachandran; Brief Tour Consciousness | 26 | The new pathway in the cortex does what we usually think of as vision, such as recognizing objects consciously. | 0 | ||
| Ramachandran; Brief Tour Consciousness | 27 | Anatomical organization of the visual pathways (diagram) | 1 | ||
| Ramachandran; Brief Tour Consciousness | 28 | The old pathway is involved in locating objects spatially in the visual field, and enabling you to reach out for it or swivel your eyeballs toward it. | 1 | ||
| Ramachandran; Brief Tour Consciousness | 28 | The high acuity central folio region of the retina can be directed toward the object so that the new visual pathway can then proceed to identify the object and generate an appropriate behavior. | 0 | ||
| Ramachandran; Brief Tour Consciousness | 28 | A neurological syndrome called blindsight is caused by damage to the visual cortex while one side of the brain resulting in blindness on the opposite side. | 0 | ||
| Ramachandran; Brief Tour Consciousness | 29 | Only the new visual pathway is conscious. | 1 | ||
| Ramachandran; Brief Tour Consciousness | 29 | The old visual pathway, going through the colliculus and guiding the hand movement, can occur without a person being conscious of it. | 0 | ||
| Ramachandran; Brief Tour Consciousness | 32 | Neural computations involved in a meaningful use of language to require consciousness, but those involved in driving do not involve consciousness. | 3 | ||
| Ramachandran; Brief Tour Consciousness | 32 | The parietal lobes are concerned with creating a symbolic representation of the spatial layout of the external world. | 0 | ||
| Ramachandran; Brief Tour Consciousness | 32 | Damage to the right of parietal low can produce the syndrome of neglect, causing a patient to eat only from the right side of the plate and leave the food on the left side uneaten. | 0 | ||
| Ramachandran; Brief Tour Consciousness | 33 | Neglect is caused by damage to the right hemisphere, and the patient is usually paralyzed on the left side. | 1 | ||
| Ramachandran; Brief Tour Consciousness | 36 | When confronted with a discrepancy, the left hemisphere's coping style if this smooth over it, pretending it doesn't exist and forge ahead. | 3 | ||
| Ramachandran; Brief Tour Consciousness | 36 | The right hemisphere is coping style is the exact opposite. The right side is highly sensitive to discrepancies. | 0 | ||
| Ramachandran; Brief Tour Consciousness | 36 | The right hemisphere notices the discrepancy between the motor command and the lack of visual feedback and recognizes paralysis. | 0 | ||
| Ramachandran; Brief Tour Consciousness | 37 | For a person to deny that he had she is paralyzed is quite bizarre. | 1 | ||
| Ramachandran; Brief Tour Consciousness | 38 | If mirror neurons are damaged, a patient can no longer construct an internal model of someone else's actions in order to judge whether that person is accurately carrying out a command. | 1 | ||
| Ramachandran; Brief Tour Consciousness | 38 | Mirror neurons are known as monkey-see, monkey-do neurons. | 0 | ||
| Ramachandran; Brief Tour Consciousness | 38 | Culture depends crucially on imitation of parents and teachers, and the imitation of complex skills may require that the participation of mirror neurons. | 0 | ||
| Ramachandran; Brief Tour Consciousness | 41 | Science deals with universal principles whereas art is the ultimate celebration of human individuality and originality. | 3 | ||
| Ramachandran; Brief Tour Consciousness | 41 | Assume that 90% of the variance seen in art is driven by cultural diversity. | 0 | ||
| Ramachandran; Brief Tour Consciousness | 41 | To Indian eyes the goddess Parvathi dating to the 12th century is a very epitome of feminine sensuality, grace, poise, dignity, elegance, everything that's good about being a woman, and she is very voluptuous. | 0 | ||
| Ramachandran; Brief Tour Consciousness | 42 | Classical Greek and Roman art, where realism is strongly emphasized. | 1 | ||
| Ramachandran; Brief Tour Consciousness | 43 | Art has nothing to do with realism. It is not about creating a replica of what's out there in the world. | 1 | ||
| Ramachandran; Brief Tour Consciousness | 43 | Art involves deliberate hyperbole, exaggeration, even distortion, in order to create pleasing effects in the brain. | 0 | ||
| Ramachandran; Brief Tour Consciousness | 44 | Ramachandran's suggested universal laws of Art | 1 | ||
| Ramachandran; Brief Tour Consciousness | 59 | The understanding of the phenomenon of aesthetics lies in a more thorough understanding of the connection between the 30 visual centers in the brain and the emotional limbic structures (and of the internal logic and evolutionary rationale that drives them). | 15 | ||
| Ramachandran; Brief Tour Consciousness | 62 | Our everyday language is replete with synesthetic metaphors, cross sensory metaphors. (e.g. cheddar cheese is sharp). | 3 | ||
| Ramachandran; Brief Tour Consciousness | 66 | Color area V4 and the so-called "number-graphene area" are close to each other in the fusiform gyrus of the temporal lobe. (diagram) | 4 | ||
| Ramachandran; Brief Tour Consciousness | 70 | Stages of number and color processing in the human brain (diagram) | 4 | ||
| Ramachandran; Brief Tour Consciousness | 76 | Noam Chomsky, the founding father of linguistics. | 6 | ||
| Ramachandran; Brief Tour Consciousness | 93 | Schizophrenics do indeed exhibit bizarre symptoms. They hallucinate, often hearing voices. They become delusional, thinking they are Napoleon. They are convinced the government has planted devices in their brain to monitor their thoughts and action. Or that aliens are controlling them. | 17 | ||
| Ramachandran; Brief Tour Consciousness | 96 | Ramachandran's view of consciousness. There are really two problems here -- the problem of subjective sensations or qualia and the problem of the self. | 3 | ||
| Ramachandran; Brief Tour Consciousness | 96 | What exactly is meant by the self? | 0 | ||
| Ramachandran; Brief Tour Consciousness | 96 | Five characteristics defined the self. (1) continuity, past, present and future, (2) unity or coherence of self; we each experience ourselves as one person, as a unity, (3) sense of embodiment or ownership -- we feel ourselves anchored to our bodies, (4) free will, being in charge of our own actions and destinies, (5) capable of reflection -- of being aware of itself. | 0 | ||
| Ramachandran; Brief Tour Consciousness | 98 | It seems quite obvious that qualia must have evolved to fulfill a specific biological function -- they cannot be mere byproducts (an epiphenomenon) of neural activity. | 2 | ||
| Ramachandran; Brief Tour Consciousness | 98 | Sensory representations that are themselves devoid of qualia may acquire qualia in the process of being economically encoded as higher-order representations or "metarepresentations." | 0 | ||
| Ramachandran; Brief Tour Consciousness | 99 | The metarepresentations are mediated not by a new neural structure but a set of novel functions involving a distributed network. | 1 | ||
| Ramachandran; Brief Tour Consciousness | 100 | If you combine abstraction with sequential symbol juggling you get "thinking" -- a hallmark of human species. | 1 | ||
| Ramachandran; Brief Tour Consciousness | 100 | The human brain is capable of generating "conjectures." It can tentatively try out novel -- even absurd -- juxtapositions of perceptual tokens just to see what would happen. | 0 | ||
| Ramachandran; Brief Tour Consciousness | 100 | Humans can effortlessly visualize a horse with a horn -- a unicorn -- or imagine a cow with wings. | 0 | ||
| Ramachandran; Brief Tour Consciousness | 101 | The parts of the brain that are likely involved in the novel metarepresentations are structures like -- the annular gyrus and Wernicke's area that are clustered around the left temporo-parieto-occipital (TPO) junction, and anterior cingulate, involved in "intention." | 1 | ||
| Ramachandran; Brief Tour Consciousness | 101 | When you see an apple, it is the activity in the temporal lobes that allows you to apprehend all of its implications almost simultaneously. The amygdala gauges its significance for your well-being, and Wernicke's and other areas alert you to all of the subtle nuances of meaning that the mental image including the word "apple" evokes. | 0 | ||
| Ramachandran; Brief Tour Consciousness | 101 | The choice of which implication of the perceptual image occupies center stage (attention) and what to do about it is partly mediated by the anterior cingulate cortex. | 0 | ||
| Ramachandran; Brief Tour Consciousness | 103 | Qualia and self are really two sides of a coin -- you can't have one without the other. | 2 | ||
| Ramachandran; Brief Tour Consciousness | 103 | The ability to form special brain circuits to create metarepresentations of sensory and motor representations -- partly to facilitate language and partly facilitated by language -- might have been critical for the evolution of both full-fledged qualia and a sense of self. | 0 | ||
| Ramachandran; Brief Tour Consciousness | 103 | It is impossible to have a free-floating qualia without a self experiencing it, nor a self existing in isolation, devoid of all feeling and sensation. | 0 | ||
| Ramachandran; Brief Tour Consciousness | 104 | Social emotions are based on metarepresentations of primary emotions, requiring complex interactions with social values represented in the orbitofrontal cortex. | 1 | ||
| Ramachandran; Brief Tour Consciousness | 105 | Our brains are essentially model-making machines. | 1 | ||
| Ramachandran; Brief Tour Consciousness | 105 | We need to construct useful, virtual reality simulations of the world that we can act on. | 0 | ||
| Ramachandran; Brief Tour Consciousness | 105 | Within our simulations of the world we need to construct models of other people's minds because we primates are intensely social creatures. | 0 | ||
| Ramachandran; Brief Tour Consciousness | 105 | "Theory of minds" is the term used to refer to the mental models we have constructed of other people's minds. | 0 | ||
| Ramachandran; Brief Tour Consciousness | 107 | Mirror neurons may have played a vital role in our learning through imitation and therefore the transmission of culture. | 2 | ||
| Ramachandran; Brief Tour Consciousness | 107 | Once that mirror neurons system became sophisticated enough, the remarkable ability -- imitation and mimesis -- liberated humans from the constraints of a strictly gene-based evolution. | 0 | ||
| Ramachandran; Brief Tour Consciousness | 105 | Among the great apes, orangutans are lower or reputed to display imitation of sophisticated skills | -2 | ||
| Ramachandran; Brief Tour Consciousness | 108 | The behavioral difference (caused by culture) between post-20th-century Homo sapiens and early Homo sapiens (say 75,000 years ago -- before the great leap forward) is actually much greater than the difference between Homo erectus and Homo sapiens. | 3 | ||
| Ramachandran; Brief Tour Consciousness | 111 | Free will -- the capacity to plan open-ended scenarios and try out even improbable scenarios entirely in the mind by juggling images and symbols. If linked with episodic memories, enables you to see yourself as an active agent doing things in the future (or past) and thereby generating a full-fledged sense of self. | 3 | ||
| Ramachandran; Brief Tour Consciousness | 112 | What sets humans apart from other mammals, including other primates, is not any single structure but a set of circuits that includes the temporo-parieto-occipital junction (especially the angular and supramarginal gyri), the Wernicke's area (concerned with semantics) and the anterior cingulate with its limbic connections ("attention," "will," "desire," and the right parietal and insular concerned with embodiment). | 1 | ||