Muddula Oblongata

So what happens when you work neuroscience? When you read of the man who mistook his wife for a hat? Or the artist who lost all sense of colour and could only eat food that was black and white because everything looked grey? Or the woman who forgot how her body moved in space? Those who have followed the works of Oliver Sacks will recognise the case studies from The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and An Anthropologist from Mars. They will remember the fear they felt at all the things that can go wrong. One moment of carelessness, one stray automobile and your life is changed irrevocably. Once your brain changes, you change. How you change depends on which parts of the brain have been affected. Nothing else constitutes you or even your notion of you. Neuroscience is making us aware of our fragility and the even greater and more frightening fragility of the reality we create for ourselves through the perceptions the brain moderates and sorts for us.

V.S. Ramachandran’s Phantoms in the Brain does nothing to dispel this feeling. In the course of three pages, he tells you of three syndromes. Each is rare but all come with the attached message: this might happen to you. With Capgras’ Syndrome, the sufferer begins to think that people around him are impostors. There’s Cotard’s Syndrome where the patient feels that he is dead and his flesh is crawling with worms. With Fregoli’s Syndrome, the victim feels he is seeing the same person everywhere. And all these things happen because of a problem with a tiny part of the brain called the amygdala.

Ramachandran is one of America’s leading neuroscientists. He writes with flair and passion about perception. He comments that when he tells people he is researching perception, they regularly ask him: "But what is there to research?" Quite a lot, if you think about it. Perception may be intangible, subjective, mysterious but it is the only way in which we can tell that the world is there, that it is real, that we are real.

What happens if something interferes with that, if you were to end up with a form of Capgras’ Syndrome in which you were the impostor? How much more would it take to actually drive you around the bend?

Drive! That very word is like a drill that tolls these patients back to their sick selves. It is instructive to note how many of these patients had automobiles of some kind or the other involved in their accidents.

Perhaps what the US also needs is an anti-car lobby. Or perhaps all it needs is the growing perception that a gun is a dangerous weapon. But perception is where we came in.