Ramachandran; Tell-Tale Brain
Book	Page		Topic
Ramachandran; Tell-Tale Brain	17		In humans that cortex has grown so large that it has been forced to become convoluted (folded), giving it its famous cauliflower like appearance. (In contrast, the cortex of most other mammals is smooth and flat for the most part, with few if any folds in the surface.)
Ramachandran; Tell-Tale Brain	17		The brainstem is divided into three lobes: medulla, ponds, and midbrain.
Ramachandran; Tell-Tale Brain	18		The medulla and nuclei on the floor of the ponds control important vital functions like breathing, blood pressure, and body temperature.
Ramachandran; Tell-Tale Brain	18		The cerebellum controls the fine coordination of movements and is also involved in balance, gate, and posture.
Ramachandran; Tell-Tale Brain	18		The cerebellum also receives sensory feedback from muscles and joints receptors throughout the body.
Ramachandran; Tell-Tale Brain	18		Mismatches between intended action and the actual action can be detected and appropriate corrections can be inserted into the outgoing motor signal.
Ramachandran; Tell-Tale Brain	18		The thalamus receives its major inputs from the sense organs and relieved relays them to the sensory cortex.
Ramachandran; Tell-Tale Brain	18		The basal ganglia air are cluster of structures that are concerned with the control of automatic movements associated with complex volitional actions.
Ramachandran; Tell-Tale Brain	18		Damage to cells in the basal ganglia result in disorders like Parkinson's disease, in which the patient's torso is stiff, his face is an expressionless mask, and he walks with a characteristic shuffling gait.
Ramachandran; Tell-Tale Brain	19		Excessive amounts of brain chemical dopamine and the basal ganglia can lead to disorders known as choreas which are characterized by uncontrollable movements that have a superficial resemblance to dancing
Ramachandran; Tell-Tale Brain	19		Each cerebral hemisphere of its cerebral cortex is subdivided into four lobes: occipital, temporal, Parenteau, and frontal.
Ramachandran; Tell-Tale Brain	19		Tthe occipital lobes are mainly concerned with visual processing. They are subdivided into as many as 30 distinct processing regions.
Ramachandran; Tell-Tale Brain	19		The temporal lobes a specialized for hire perceptual functions, such as recognizing faces.
Ramachandran; Tell-Tale Brain	19		The upper part of the left temporal lobe contains a patch of cortex known as Wernicke's area. In humans this area is seven times the size of the same area in chimpanzees.
Ramachandran; Tell-Tale Brain	19		Wernicke's area function is the comprehensive comprehension of meaning and the semantic aspects of language.
Ramachandran; Tell-Tale Brain	19		The parietal lobes are primarily involved in processing touch, muscle, and joint information from the body and combining it with vision, hearing, and balance to give you a rich "multi-media" understanding of your self and the world around you.
Ramachandran; Tell-Tale Brain	22		Mirror neurons fire not only when you perform an action, but also when you watch someone else    perform the same action.
Ramachandran; Tell-Tale Brain	22		What mirror neurons do is effectively allow you to empathize with another person    and read their intentions.		0
Ramachandran; Tell-Tale Brain	22		Usually your mirror neurons are reasonably accurate guesses of others' intentions.		0
Ramachandran; Tell-Tale Brain	22		Mirror neurons are also seen in apes,    but only in humans have these neurons developed to the point of being able to model aspect of others' minds    rather than merely their actions.		0
Ramachandran; Tell-Tale Brain	23		Mirror neurons may well be central to social learning,    imitation,    and cultural transmission    of skills and attitudes.		1
Ramachandran; Tell-Tale Brain	23		By hyperdeveloping the mirror neuron system,    evolution in effect turned culture into the new genome.		0
Ramachandran; Tell-Tale Brain	23		Culture became a significant new source of evolutionary pressure,    which helped select for brains that had even better mirror neuron systems and imitative learning associated with them.		0
Ramachandran; Tell-Tale Brain	38		Laughter -- and its cognitive companion, humor -- is a universal trait present in all cultures.		15
Ramachandran; Tell-Tale Brain	38		Why and how    humor evolved    is a mystery.		0
Ramachandran; Tell-Tale Brain	38		In any joke or humorous incident, you narrate a story step-by-step,    leading the listener along the garden path of expectation,    and then introduce an unexpected twist, a punch line,    the comprehension of which requires a complete reinterpretation of the preceding events.    But that's not enough.    The extra key ingredient is that the new interpretation must be inconsequential.		0
Ramachandran; Tell-Tale Brain	39		Laughter may be nature's 'false alarm' signal.    By laughing you inform people in the vicinity    not to waste their resources rushing to an unfortunate victim's aid.    It is nature's "all's okay" signal.		1
Ramachandran; Tell-Tale Brain	39		The sensation of pain    is initially processed in a small structure called the insula ("island"),    which is folded deep beneath the temporal lobe on side of the brain.		0
Ramachandran; Tell-Tale Brain	39		From the insular    the pain information is then relayed    to the anterior cingulate in the frontal lobes.		0
Ramachandran; Tell-Tale Brain	39		It is in the anterior cingulate    that you feel the actual unpleasantness --    the agony and awfulness of pain --    along with an expectation of danger.		0
Ramachandran; Tell-Tale Brain	39		Humans have two key ingredients for laughter -- a palpable and imminent indication that alarm is warranted (from the insula)    followed by a "no-big-deal" follow-up.		0
Ramachandran; Tell-Tale Brain	41		Carnivores and herbivores probably have fewer than a dozen visual areas and no color vision.		2
Ramachandran; Tell-Tale Brain	41		Humans have as many as 30 visual areas instead of a mere dozen.		0
Ramachandran; Tell-Tale Brain	42		The shift in diet of our shrew-like ancestors    from tiny nocturnal insects to red, yellow, and blue fruits,    as well as to leaves whose nutritional value was color-coded into various shades of green, brown, and yellow,    propelled the emergence of a sophisticated system for color vision.		1
Ramachandran; Tell-Tale Brain	62		Visual information    from the retina gets to the brain    via two pathways.(diagram)		20
Ramachandran; Tell-Tale Brain	62		The old pathway relays through the superior colliculus, arriving eventually in the parietal lobe.		0
Ramachandran; Tell-Tale Brain	62		The new visual pathway goes via the lateral genetically nucleus (LGN) to the visual cortex    and then splits once again into the "how" and "what" streams.		0
Ramachandran; Tell-Tale Brain	62		The old pathway enables us to orient toward objects and track them with our eyes and heads.		0
Ramachandran; Tell-Tale Brain	63		The new pathway,    which is highly developed in humans and in primates generally,    allows sophisticated analysis and recognition of complex visual scenes and objects.		1
Ramachandran; Tell-Tale Brain	63		The new pathway projects from the retina to V1, the first and largest of our cortical visual maps, and from their splits into two subpathways, or streams -- the "where" stream and "what" strain.		0
Ramachandran; Tell-Tale Brain	63		The "where" stream is concerned with the relationship among visual objects in space.		0
Ramachandran; Tell-Tale Brain	63		The what stream is concerned with the relationships of features within visual objects themselves.		0
Ramachandran; Tell-Tale Brain	63		The where stream's function overlaps to some extent with that of the old pathway, but it mediates much more sophisticated aspects of spatial vision -- determining the overall spatial layout of the visual scene rather than just the location of an object.		0
Ramachandran; Tell-Tale Brain	63		The "where" stream projects to the parietal lobe    and has strong links to the motor system.		0
Ramachandran; Tell-Tale Brain	63		Most of these computations are unconscious and highly automated.		0
Ramachandran; Tell-Tale Brain	63		A blindsight patient suffered substantial damage to his left visual cortex -- the origin for both the "where" and "what" streams.		0
Ramachandran; Tell-Tale Brain	63		Blindsight discovered in Oxford by Larry Weizkrantz in the late 1970s.		0
Ramachandran; Tell-Tale Brain	64		The "what" pathway projects from V1 to the fusiform gyrus,    an area mainly performing the classification of objects.		1
Ramachandran; Tell-Tale Brain	64		Some aspects of meaning are probably fed back from higher centers to the fusiform.		0
Ramachandran; Tell-Tale Brain	64		As the ventral pathway precedes past the fusiform to other parts of the temporal lobes,    it evokes not only the name of the thing    but a penumbra of associated memories and facts about it --    broadly speaking the semantics,    or meaning,    of an object.		0
Ramachandran; Tell-Tale Brain	64		The semantic retrieval process involves widespread activation of the temporal lobes, but it seems to center on a handful of bottlenecks that include Wernicke's language area and the inferior parietal lobule (IPL), which is involved in quintessentially human abilities such as naming, reading, writing, and arithmetic.		0
Ramachandran; Tell-Tale Brain	65		Once the meaning is extracted,    the neural messages are relayed to the amygdala,    evoking feelings    about what (or whom) you are seeing.		1
Ramachandran; Tell-Tale Brain	65		A third pathway carrying biologically salient stimuli such as eyes, food, facial expressions, and animate motion passes from the fusiform gyrus through an area of the temporal lobe called the superior temporal sulcus (STS) and then straight to the amygdala.		0
Ramachandran; Tell-Tale Brain	65		The third pathway bypasses high-level object perception    and shunts quickly to the amygdala.		0
Ramachandran; Tell-Tale Brain	65		The third pathway is a shortcut, probably evolved to promote fast reaction to the high-value situations, whether innate or learned.		0
Ramachandran; Tell-Tale Brain	65		The amygdala works in conjunction with past stored memories and other structures in the limbic system to gauge the emotional significance.		0
Ramachandran; Tell-Tale Brain	65		For an intense feeling, the signals from the amygdala cascade into the hypothalamus, which not only orchestrates the release of hormones but also activates the autonomic nervous system to prepare for appropriate action.		0
Ramachandran; Tell-Tale Brain	65		Medical students use the mnemonic of the "four F's"    to remember feeding, fighting, fleeing, or wooing.		0
Ramachandran; Tell-Tale Brain	65		The autonomic responses include all of the physiological signs of strong emotion such as increased heart rate, rapid shallow breathing, and sweating.		0
Ramachandran; Tell-Tale Brain	65		The amygdala is also connected with the frontal lobes, which adds subtle flavors of the 4F cocktail of primal emotions, so that you have not just anger, lust, and fear, but also arrogance, pride, caution, admiration, magnanimity, etc.		0
Ramachandran; Tell-Tale Brain	66		Segmentation, the function involved in knowing which fragments of a visual scene belong together to constitute a single object, is a critical prelude to object recognition in the "what" stream.		1
Ramachandran; Tell-Tale Brain	67		Color vision area V4 lies in the same brain region -- the fusiform gyrus -- as the face recognition area.		1
Ramachandran; Tell-Tale Brain	68		Emotionally responding to the recognition of objects or faces    is the very last step    in the chain of events that we call perception.		1
Ramachandran; Tell-Tale Brain	69		Strong sexual attraction to his mother    when he was a baby --    the so-called Oedipus complex.		1
Ramachandran; Tell-Tale Brain	70		Part of the continuous autonomic reactions to experience is microsweating -- your whole body, including your palms, become damper or dryer in proportion to the level of emotional arousal.		1
Ramachandran; Tell-Tale Brain	70		measure emotional reaction to things by simply monitoring the degree of micro selecting.
Ramachandran; Tell-Tale Brain	70		tape being too passive electrodes to the skin and routing them through a ohmmeter.
Ramachandran; Tell-Tale Brain	70		monitor a galvanic skin response (GSR), the moment to moment fluctuations and the electrical resistance of the skin.
Ramachandran; Tell-Tale Brain	94		The number area and V4    are right next to each other    in the fusiform gyrus.		24
Ramachandran; Tell-Tale Brain	94		The most common type of synesthesia    is the number-color type,    and the number and color areas    are immediate neighbors in the brain.		0
Ramachandran; Tell-Tale Brain	94		Since the 19th century    a debate has raged between phrenology -- the notion that different functions are sharply localized in different brain areas --    versus holism, which holds that functions are emergent properties of the entire brain whose parts are in constant interaction.		0
Ramachandran; Tell-Tale Brain	95		Even high-level perception such as tools or vegetables or fruits -- which border on being concepts rather than mere perceptions -- can be lost selectively depending on the particular small region of the brain that is damaged by stroke or accident.		1
Ramachandran; Tell-Tale Brain	95		The brain's specialized regions are organized as hierarchies.		0
Ramachandran; Tell-Tale Brain	95		In the brain's hierarchical system,    each higher level carries out more sophisticated tasks,    but there is an enormous amount of feedback and crosstalk.		0
Ramachandran; Tell-Tale Brain	95		Numerical computation seems to occur in stages -- an early stage in the fusiform gyrus where the actual shapes of numbers are represented, and a later stage in the angular gyrus concerned with numerical concepts such as ordinality (sequence) and cardinality (quantity).		0
Ramachandran; Tell-Tale Brain	98		The insula maps internal feelings from your body.		3
Ramachandran; Tell-Tale Brain	98		The insula receives continuous streams of sensation    from receptor cells in your heart, lungs, liver, viscera, bones, joints, ligaments, fascia, and muscles,    as well as from specialized receptors in your skin that sense heat, cold, pain, sensual touch, and perhaps tickle and itch.		0
Ramachandran; Tell-Tale Brain	98		The insula uses its input streams of information to represent how you feel    in relation to the outside world and your immediate environment.		0
Ramachandran; Tell-Tale Brain	98		As a central player in your emotional life,    your insula sends signals to and receives signals from    other emotional centers in your brain including the amygdala, the autonomic nervous system (powered by the hypothalamus),    and the orbitofrontal cortex, which is involved in nuanced emotional judgments.		0
Ramachandran; Tell-Tale Brain	98		The insula receives strong taste input from the tongue.		0
Ramachandran; Tell-Tale Brain	101		The fusiform gyrus represents not only shapes like letters of the alphabet    but faces as well.		3
Ramachandran; Tell-Tale Brain	102		Neurally linking    color with emotion    was probably initially to attract us    to ripe fruit and/or tender new shoots and leaves.		1
Ramachandran; Tell-Tale Brain	102		The linked effects of color and emotion probably arise through interactions between the insula and higher brain regions devoted to color.		0
Ramachandran; Tell-Tale Brain	103		The musician Listz may have seen colors where there were only tones.		1
Ramachandran; Tell-Tale Brain	104		One thing that poets and novelists have in common is that they are especially good at using metaphor.		1
Ramachandran; Tell-Tale Brain	106		Puns are based on superficial associations.		2
Ramachandran; Tell-Tale Brain	106		Schizophrenics, who have miswired brains,    are terrible at interpreting metaphors and proverbs,    yet according to clinical folklore, they are very good at puns.		0
Ramachandran; Tell-Tale Brain	106		Both metaphors and puns involve linking seemingly unrelated concepts.		0
Ramachandran; Tell-Tale Brain	106		Puns are actually the opposite of metaphor.    A metaphor exploits a surface-level similarity to reveal a deep hidden connection.    A pun is a surface-level similarity that masquerades as a deep one --    hence its comic appeal.		0
Ramachandran; Tell-Tale Brain	107		Relatively high incidence of schizophrenia and bipolar disorder in humans.		1
Ramachandran; Tell-Tale Brain	107		The retention of genes for schizophrenia and bipolar disorder in the human population    may have advantages in boosting creativity,    intelligence,    or subtle social-emotional faculties.		0
Ramachandran; Tell-Tale Brain	117		Mirror neurons may have played a pivotal role    in humans becoming the one and only species    that veritably lives and breathes culture.		10
Ramachandran; Tell-Tale Brain	117		Culture consists of massive collections of complex skills and knowledge,    which are transferred from person to person through two core mediums:    language and imitation.		0
Ramachandran; Tell-Tale Brain	118		The ability to save the world from another person's vantage point is essential for constructing a mental model of another person's complex thoughts and intentions in order to predict and manipulate his behavior.		1
Ramachandran; Tell-Tale Brain	118		A theory of mind    is unique to humans.		0
Ramachandran; Tell-Tale Brain	118		Certain aspects of language was probably built partly on our facility for imitation.		0
Ramachandran; Tell-Tale Brain	118		Darwin's theory of evolution    is one of the most important scientific discoveries of all time.		0
Ramachandran; Tell-Tale Brain	118		Unfortunately, Darwin's theory of evolution makes no provision for an afterlife.    Consequently it has provoked more acrimonious debate than any other topic in science.		0
Ramachandran; Tell-Tale Brain	118		Richard Dawkins has stated that teaching intelligent design    is little different    from giving equal status    to the idea that the sun goes around the earth.		0
Ramachandran; Tell-Tale Brain	118		The hominid brain reach nearly its present size, and perhaps even its present intellectual capacity, about 300,000 years ago.		0
Ramachandran; Tell-Tale Brain	118		Many of the attributes we regard a uniquely human -- such as toolmaking,    fire building,    art,   music, and perhaps even full-blown language -- appeared only much later, around 75,000 years ago.		0
Ramachandran; Tell-Tale Brain	119		Crude Oldowan tools -- made by just a few blows to a core stone to create an irregular edge --    emerged 2.4 million years ago    and were probably made by Homo habilis,    whose brain size was halfway between that of chimps and modern humans.		1
Ramachandran; Tell-Tale Brain	119		After 1 million years of evolutionary stasis, aesthetically pleasing symmetrical tools began to appear, which reflected a standardized production technique. These required switching from a hard hammer to a soft, perhaps a wooden, hammer while the tool is being made, so as to ensure a smooth rather than a jagged irregular edge.		0
Ramachandran; Tell-Tale Brain	119		The invention of stereotyped assembly-line tools -- sophisticated symmetrical bifacial tools    that were hafted to a handle --    took place only 200,000 years ago.		0
Ramachandran; Tell-Tale Brain	119		What was the role of tool use    in shaping human cognition?		0
Ramachandran; Tell-Tale Brain	119		"Great leap" in mental sophistication about 60,000 years ago --    widespread cave art,    clothing,    and constructed dwellings appeared.		0
Ramachandran; Tell-Tale Brain	119		Humans are often called the "Machiavellian primate,"    referring to our ability to predict other people's behavior    and outsmart them.		0
Ramachandran; Tell-Tale Brain	119		Why are humans so good at reading one another's intention?		0
Ramachandran; Tell-Tale Brain	120		How did language evolve?		1
Ramachandran; Tell-Tale Brain	120		Unlike many other human traits    such as humor,    art,    dancing,    and music,    the survival value of language is obvious -- it lets us communicate our thoughts and intentions.		0
Ramachandran; Tell-Tale Brain	120		The human vocal apparatus is vastly more sophisticated    than any other ape,    but without the correspondingly sophisticated language areas in the brain,    such exquisite articulatory equipment alone would be useless.		0
Ramachandran; Tell-Tale Brain	120		Maybe our vocal equipment and our remarkable ability to modulate our voice    evolved mainly for producing emotional calls and musical sounds during courtship in early primates.		0
Ramachandran; Tell-Tale Brain	120		Is language    mediated by a sophisticated and highly specialized mental language organ    that is unique to humans    as suggested by MIT linguist Noam Chomsky?		0
Ramachandran; Tell-Tale Brain	120		Is there a more primitive gestural communication system    already in place    that provided scaffolding for the emergence of vocal language?    A major piece of the solution comes from the discovery of  mirror neurons.		0
Ramachandran; Tell-Tale Brain	121		In monkeys,    mirror neurons enable that prediction a simple goal-directed actions of other monkeys.		1
Ramachandran; Tell-Tale Brain	121		In humans, mirror neurons have become sophisticated enough to interpret even complex actions.		0
Ramachandran; Tell-Tale Brain	121		Mirror neurons also enable us to an imitate the movements of others,    thereby setting the stage for cultural "inheritance"    of skills developed and honed by others.		0
Ramachandran; Tell-Tale Brain	122		Mirror neurons may also enable you to mime the lip and tongue movements of others,    which could provide the evolutionary basis for vertebral  utterances.		1
Ramachandran; Tell-Tale Brain	122		The mirror neuron arguments do not in any way negate the idea    that there are specialized brain areas for language in humans.		0
Ramachandran; Tell-Tale Brain	123		One of the chief areas where mirror neurons abound in monkeys,    the ventral premotor area,    may be a precursor of our celebrated Broca's area,    a brain center associated with the expressive aspects of human language.		1
Ramachandran; Tell-Tale Brain	123		Language is not confined to any single brain area,    but the left inferior parietal lobe is certainly one of the areas that are crucially involved,    especially in the representation of word meaning.		0
Ramachandran; Tell-Tale Brain	123		In the strange disorder call anosognosia,    people seem unaware of    or deny their disability.		0
Ramachandran; Tell-Tale Brain	123		Most people with a right hemisphere stroke    have complete paralysis of the left side of their body    and, as you might expect, complain about it.		0
Ramachandran; Tell-Tale Brain	123		About 5% of patients with right hemisphere stroke will vehemently deny their paralysis,    even though they are mentally otherwise lucid and intelligent.		0
Ramachandran; Tell-Tale Brain	123		President Woodrow Wilson, whose left side was paralyzed by a stroke in 1919,    insisted that he was perfectly fine.		0
Ramachandran; Tell-Tale Brain	124		Neurons in the anterior cingulate have long been known to respond to physical pain.		1
Ramachandran; Tell-Tale Brain	124		Anytime you watch someone doing something,    the neurons that your brain would use    to do the same thing become active --    as if you yourself were doing it.		0
Ramachandran; Tell-Tale Brain	125		Some degree of leakage from the mirror neuron system can occur in normal individuals.    We feel ourselves unconsciously flexing our muscles    when watching an athlete beginning to throw a football.		1
Ramachandran; Tell-Tale Brain	126		Are mirror neuron functions    present innately,    or learned,    or perhaps a little of both?		1
Ramachandran; Tell-Tale Brain	126		How are mirror neurons wired up,    and how do they perform their functions?		0
Ramachandran; Tell-Tale Brain	127		A newborn infant will often protrude its tongue when watching its mother do it. The neural circuitry involved must be hardwired and not based on associative learning.		1
Ramachandran; Tell-Tale Brain	127		An infant's smile echoing its mother's smile appears at about six weeks, but it can't be based on learning since the infant can't see its own face. It has to be innate.		0
Ramachandran; Tell-Tale Brain	128		Mirror neurons allow you to figure out    someone else's intentions.		1
Ramachandran; Tell-Tale Brain	128		The ability to have a theory of mind may exist in the great apes in rudimentary form, but humans are exceptionally good at it.		0
Ramachandran; Tell-Tale Brain	128		In addition to allowing us to see the world from another person's visual vantage point, mirror neurons have evolved further, enabling us to adopt the other person's conceptual vantage point.		0
Ramachandran; Tell-Tale Brain	128		We use metaphors    like "I see what you mean"    or "Try to see it from my point of view."		0
Ramachandran; Tell-Tale Brain	128		As a corollary to adopting the others point of view,    you can also see yourself as others see you --    an essential ingredient of self awareness.		0
Ramachandran; Tell-Tale Brain	128		When we speak of someone being self-conscious,    what we really mean is that she is    conscious of someone else being conscious of her.		0
Ramachandran; Tell-Tale Brain	132		Most English speakers have a vocabulary of about 10,000 words.		4
Ramachandran; Tell-Tale Brain	132		Mirror neurons allow us to imitate.		0
Ramachandran; Tell-Tale Brain	132		Miming may have been the key step in hominid evolution,    resulting in our ability to transmit knowledge through example.		0
Ramachandran; Tell-Tale Brain	138		The human's highly sophisticated theory of mind    is one of the most unique and powerful faculties of the human brain.		6
Ramachandran; Tell-Tale Brain	138		Human theory of mind apparently does not rely on general intelligence -- the rational intelligence used to reason, draw inferences, combine facts, etc. -- but on a specialized set of brain mechanisms that evolved to endow us with our equally important degree of social intelligence.		0
Ramachandran; Tell-Tale Brain	139		Perhaps autistic children's profound deficits in social interactions    stem from their theory of mind circuitry being somehow compromised.		1
Ramachandran; Tell-Tale Brain	139		Many brain imaging studies have been conducted on children with autism.		0
Ramachandran; Tell-Tale Brain	139		Children with autism have larger brains within large ventricles.		0
Ramachandran; Tell-Tale Brain	139		Symptoms typical of autism (e.g. lack of empathy and social skills) are never seen in cerebellar disease.		0
Ramachandran; Tell-Tale Brain	140		Perhaps the main cause of autism    is a dysfunctional mirror-neuron system.		1
Ramachandran; Tell-Tale Brain	163		Only humans, as far as we know, can use metaphor and analogy.		23
Ramachandran; Tell-Tale Brain	163		Flexible, recursive syntax is found only in human language.		0
Ramachandran; Tell-Tale Brain	163		Two topics in brain research always seem to attract geniuses and crackpots.    One is consciousness and the other is the question of how language evolved.		0
Ramachandran; Tell-Tale Brain	164		Richard Dawkins has pointed out they are numerous creatures in nature    with eyes at all stages of complexity.		1
Ramachandran; Tell-Tale Brain	165		Simplest possible light sensing mechanism --    a patch of light sensitive cells on the outer skin.		1
Ramachandran; Tell-Tale Brain	165		Darwin's contemporary Alfred Russell Wallace,    who independently discovered the principle of natural selection.		0
Ramachandran; Tell-Tale Brain	165		Founding father of modern linguistic science,    Noam Chomsky.		0
Ramachandran; Tell-Tale Brain	165		A good example of emergence is the taste of salt, formed by combining the pungent, greenish, poisonous gas chlorine with the shiny, light metal sodium. Neither of these elements has anything salt-like about it.		0
Ramachandran; Tell-Tale Brain	175		Performing the translation between    visual appearance,    sound representation in auditory cortex,    and sequences of muscle twitches in Broca's area    almost certainly involve the activation of circuits would mirror-neuron-like properties.    The inferior parietal lobules (IPL), rich in mirror neurons, is ideally suited for this role.
Ramachandran; Tell-Tale Brain	176		Semantics -- roughly speaking, the meaning of a sentence.		11
Ramachandran; Tell-Tale Brain	176		Although we know that Wernicke's area and parts of the temporo-parieto-occipital (TPO) junction, including the angular gyrus,    are critically involved in semantics,    we have no idea how neurons in these areas actually do their job.		0
Ramachandran; Tell-Tale Brain	176		The manner in which neural circuitry embodies meaning is one of the great unsolved mysteries of neuroscience.		0
Ramachandran; Tell-Tale Brain	178		The IPL (including the angular gyrus) -- strategically located between the touch, vision, and hearing parts of the brain -- evolved originally for cross modal abstraction.		2
Ramachandran; Tell-Tale Brain	178		The upper part of the IPL, the supramarginal gyrus,    is also unique to humans,    and is directly involved in the production,    comprehension,    and imitation of complex skills.		0
Ramachandran; Tell-Tale Brain	181		Syntax -- the aspect of language that is most unequivocally human.		3
Ramachandran; Tell-Tale Brain	181		Syntactic structure gives human language its enormous range and flexibility.		0
Ramachandran; Tell-Tale Brain	181		Exaptation principle -- the notion that adaptation to one specific function    becomes assimilated into another,    entirely different function.		0
Ramachandran; Tell-Tale Brain	183		Two key human abilities -- language and abstraction.		2
Ramachandran; Tell-Tale Brain	183		Link between language and sequential thinking,    or reasoning in logical steps.		0
Ramachandran; Tell-Tale Brain	183		Thinking involves, among other things, the ability to engage in open-ended symbol manipulation in your brain following certain rules.		0
Ramachandran; Tell-Tale Brain	188		The one aspect that makes the deep grammatical structure in humans unique is recursive embedding.		5
Ramachandran; Tell-Tale Brain	188		When people say that deep structure and syntactic organization are normal in Wernicke's aphasia, they are usually referring to the more obvious aspects, such as the ability to generate a fully formed sentence employing nouns, prepositions, and conjunctions but carrying no meaningful content.		0
Ramachandran; Tell-Tale Brain	189		Wernick's aphasia example, "John and Mary went to the joyful bank and paid hat."		1
Ramachandran; Tell-Tale Brain	189		The speech output of Wernicke's aphasics isn't entirely normal even in its syntactic structure.		0
Ramachandran; Tell-Tale Brain	189		In the speech of Wernicke's aphasics,    in addition to the absence of meaning,    the most striking an obvious loss is recursive embedding.		0
Ramachandran; Tell-Tale Brain	189		Wernicke's aphasics    speak in loosely strung together phrases    using conjunctions.		0
Ramachandran; Tell-Tale Brain	189		Recursion may turn out to be a property of Wernicke's area,    and indeed may be a general property of many brain functions.		0
Ramachandran; Tell-Tale Brain	189		Language capacity    evolved through natural selection    over 200,000 years.		0
Ramachandran; Tell-Tale Brain	190		All mammals have three tiny bones -- malleus, stapes, and incus -- inside the middle ear (mammals have them but they are reptile ancestors don't).		1
Ramachandran; Tell-Tale Brain	190		Comparative anatomists, embryologists, and paleontologists discovered that the middle ear bones    evolved from    the back of the jawbone of the reptile.		0
Ramachandran; Tell-Tale Brain	190		The mammalian jaw has a single bone, the mandible,    whereas the reptilian ancestors have three.		0
Ramachandran; Tell-Tale Brain	190		Reptiles, unlike mammals, frequently consume enormous prey    rather than frequent small meals.		0
Ramachandran; Tell-Tale Brain	190		The reptile jaw is used exclusively for swallowing,    not chewing,    and due to reptiles' slow metabolic rate,    the unchewed food in the stomach    can take weeks to break down and digest.		0
Ramachandran; Tell-Tale Brain	190		The reptile kind of eating    requires a large, flexible, multihinged jaw.		0
Ramachandran; Tell-Tale Brain	190		Reptiles lie low on the ground    with their limbs sprawled outward,    swinging their neck and head    close to the ground    while they sniff for prey.		0
Ramachandran; Tell-Tale Brain	190		For reptiles, the three bones of the jaw    lying on the ground    allowed reptiles to transmit sounds made by other animals' nearby footsteps    to the vicinity of the ear.		0
Ramachandran; Tell-Tale Brain	190		As reptiles evolved into mammals, they raised themselves up from a sprawling position, which allowed two of the three jaw bones to become progressively assimilated into the middle ear, being taken over entirely for hearing airborne sounds and giving up the chewing function altogether.		0
Ramachandran; Tell-Tale Brain	192		How does the human brain respond to beauty?		2
Ramachandran; Tell-Tale Brain	200		Gestalt psychologists were good at pointing out laws of perception.
Ramachandran; Tell-Tale Brain	201		the log grouping was discovered by Gestalt psychologists around the turn of the 20th century.
Ramachandran; Tell-Tale Brain	205		looking at the big object of which only fragments of visible. Many cells fire and parallel to signal the different fragments.
Ramachandran; Tell-Tale Brain	205		Synchrony tells higher brain centers that the fragments belong to a single object.
Ramachandran; Tell-Tale Brain	205		synchrony of Liles the spike trains to be encoded in such a way that a coherent output emerges, which is relayed to the emotional core of the brain.
Ramachandran; Tell-Tale Brain	206		there are back projections from the amygdala and the and of the brain structures such as the nucleus accumbens to almost every visual area in the hierarchy of visual processing.
Ramachandran; Tell-Tale Brain	206		the the shift effect relates to how your brain responds to exaggerated stimuli.
Ramachandran; Tell-Tale Brain	209		The relevance of the peak shift law to caricatures and to the human body is obvious.
Ramachandran; Tell-Tale Brain	212		of the 30 or so visual processing areas in the human brain, a few – especially V4 – are devoted primarily to color.
Ramachandran; Tell-Tale Brain	213		The principal of ultranormal stimuli may be relevant not just to art but to the quirks of aesthetic preference such as whom you are struck attracted to.
Ramachandran; Tell-Tale Brain	236		metaphor and language is well known, but it's not widely appreciated that it's also used extensively in visual art.
Ramachandran; Tell-Tale Brain	236		multiple layers of metaphor and meaning in sculpture.
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