Phantoms in the Brain

Ramachandran is famous for studying some of the disorders that can be produced for the brain. One such is phantom limb pain. Some people who have had an arm amputated continue to feel that arm, and even to have pain in it. Ramachandran devised an ingenious experiment to try to abolish that feeling. This and other clever ideas are described in this book. Readers will quickly appreciate that science is like the humanities in requiring creativity.

Nothing reveals a healthy brain’s quirks like cases of brain damage. In the style of Oliver Sacks (who wrote a foreword), the neuroscientist V.S. Ramachandran and science writer Sandra Blakeslee take us on a tour of several illuminating clinical case studies. You may know about phantom limbs, in which amputees feel like a limb is still attached. But what about people who deny ownership of a limb obviously attached to their bodies and active on their behalf? How do we piece conflicting senses into stories that make sense to us? It makes me wonder what phantoms lurk in my brain.