V. S. Ramachandran (1951–)

In 2012, for the 50th anniversary of the publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, New Scientist held a contest for its readers to vote for a curated list of what it called the 25 Most Influential Popular Science books. I resolved to eventually read all of them and after a couple year hiatus, this makes number 17 for me.

I’m not sure why it was on the list. It reads popular science enough but …

Dr. Ramachandran says “Another perverse streak of mine is that I've always been drawn to the exception rather than to the rule in every science that I've studied.”
That turns out to be a good thing because how often do disorders/syndromes/damage tell us things about “normal” functions? Quite a bit, if never enough. That is what this book is about and if abnormal gets your juices flowing, then this is for you.

I like this: “There is something distinctly odd about a hairless neotenous primate that has evolved into a species that can look back over its own shoulder and ask questions about its origins. “

And I wish I knew more doctors who approached diagnosis/treatment with “Finally, when studying and treating a patient, it is the physician's duty always to ask himself, ‘What does it feel like to be in the patient's shoes?’ ‘What if I were?’ "

[on “seeing”] “So the first step in understanding perception is to get rid of the idea of images in the brain and to begin thinking about symbolic descriptions of objects and events in the external world. “

[Candid honesty get a star bump] “People often assume that science is serious business, that it is always "theory driven," that you generate lofty conjectures based on what you already know and then proceed to design experiments specifically to test these conjectures. Actually real science is more like a fishing expedition than most of my colleagues would care to admit. “

He has a sense of humor: “The hypothalamus can be regarded, then, as the "brain" of this archaic, ancillary nervous system. The third output drives actual behaviors, often remembered by the mnemonic the "four F's"­ fighting, fleeing, feeding and sexual behavior. “

But he loses major points with: “Contrary to what many of my colleagues believe, the message preached by physicians like Deepak Chopra and Andrew Weil is not just New Age psychobabble.”

Mentioning the two cranks is bad enough. Giving either credit for anything drops this a star down from the bump. Calling it 2.5 rounded down.… (mer)