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Vilayanur Ramachandran, professor of psychology and director of the Brain and Perception Laboratory Center for Brain and Cognition at the University of California at San Diego, delivered The James S. Plant Distinguished Scientist Lecture on April 22. His lecture was titled, "What neurology can tell us about human nature and the meaning of art." The James S. Plant Distinguished Scientist Lecture Series was established in 1987 through a bequest by Dr. Plant, class of 1912 and an eminent child psychologist. The series brings outstanding scientists to campus as guest lecturers.

Ramachandran is a psychologist and neurologist, the editor of The Encyclopedia of Human Behavior, and author of the acclaimed book Phantoms in the Brain. His work is often featured in the mainstream media, and Newsweek magazine named him "one of the hundred most prominent people to watch in the next century."

In his lecture, Ramachandran discussed some of his work in behavioral neurology, studying disorders that result from small injuries to the brain and cause very specific changes in function. The first he talked about was the very rare disorder known as Capgras delusion, where an individual can recognize the face of someone they know, but are convinced that this person is an imposter. One patient with a brain injury who Ramachandran studied was able to recognize his mother when he talked to her on the phone, but when he saw her in person he would be convinced that she was only someone who looked like his mother.

Ramachandran said that this disorder has previously been explained by Freudian psychology, but that he has found evidence that it is due to a specific injury in the patient's brain which disconnected his visual recognition area from the limbic system's emotional response area. This resulted in the patient's confusion when he would visually recognize his mother but not have the usual emotional reaction to her presence. Ramachandran tested this theory by looking at the patient's Galvanic skin response (the measure of emotional stress used in lie detector tests). When the patient looked at pictures of his mother, he had no emotional response, just as most individuals do when looking at a neutral object. However, when he heard his mother on the phone, he did have the emotional response, leading Ramachandran to believe that his disorder resulted solely from a disconnect between vision and emotion.

In his book Phantoms in the Brain, Ramachandran wrote about the phenomenon of phantom limbs. He found that a patient with an amputated arm could feel sensation in the phantom limb when touched on his face. The explanation for this phenomenon is that the area of the brain responsible for sensation from the arm had begun to encroach into the area for sensation from the face, which is right next to it. Ramachandran cited this as an example of the brain's ability to change with changes in sensory input.

Another disorder Ramachandran has done research on is synesthesia, in which patients associate a number with a color for no logical reason. This phenomenon has been previously explained by simply saying that the patients were crazy. However, Ramachandran said, when someone appears to be crazy, sometimes you just have to listen more carefully to what they're saying and it may make sense. In his research into synesthesia, he has found that the association between numbers and colors really does exist in these individuals' brains. In fact, some color blind individuals are able to see colors when they look at numbers that they are not able to see in the real world. He says the cause of synesthesia is an excess of wiring (hyperconnectivity) between the areas of the brain responsible for visual recognition of numbers and the area responsible for colors. Ramachandran believes that low-level synesthesia, expressed as the predisposition for crossmodal abstraction, could be the reason that some artists are particularly adept at creating metaphors.

Switching from straight neurology to art towards the end of the lecture, Ramachandran talked about his interest in why art affects humans the way it does, and why some images are considered artistic while others are not. Realism has nothing to do with art, he said. Instead, it is hyperbole and distortion that make art pleasing to our brains. Artistic phenomena such as peak shift, exaggeration, and figural primitives hyperactivate neurons. Meanwhile, simple and sparse forms of art remove clutter and therefore draw our attention to the fundamental characteristics of the image. The connection between attention and art can also explain why autistic individuals are sometimes very gifted artists. Visual metaphor also figures prominently in art, as Ramachandran showed through an analysis of a statue of the Hindu god Shiva and it's depiction of the cycle of destruction and rebirth.

-- by Caroline O'Shea '07

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