Danny Monterroso

Is the Brain Unique? Yes and No

Dr. Vilayanur Ramachandran
UC-San Diego

Dr. Ramachandran talk about the number of neurons in the brain (around 100 billion) and the
number of synaptic connections it can make within each other, which exceed the number of elementary
particles in the known universe. When you have a lesion, you usually have a highly specified loss of
one function. So you can then ask, what is the circuitry in that area that makes that function possible?
An example he makes are lesions in the temporal lobe that can lead to memory loss -- “This woman
who's saying she is my mother is an imposter!”
He also talks about the possibility of “bogus” syndromes, one of them being Chronic
Underachievement Syndrome, Co-Dependent Personality Syndrome, another syndrome which is about
a young woman that a much older, powerful man is madly in love with her, but in denial about it, and
Koro Syndrome. He also discusses lesions in the parietal area,and how people with said lesions have a
delusion that they can use an arm that is no longer functional or active. He gives an example that a man
can be completely lucid and intelligent – such as playing chess – but when it comes to his arm that's no
longer functional, he'll be completely delusional about being able to use his arm. As well, he talks
about phantom limb, where an individual vividly feels the sensation of an arm that has been amputated.
This is, actually not a delusion: he knows the arm is taken away, even though he still feels sensation.
The pain the patient feels is usually very painful, and is known as a clinical problem. The patient
usually says that he can move his phantom limb. To test this, Dr. R. started touching parts of his body
with a Q-tip that were still intact. And then, he took a Q-tip and touched his face, which the patient felt
that Dr. R. was touching parts of his arm. He credits this for the extremely malleable ability of the
brain.
The pre-frontal cortex sends signals to the internal capsule, to the arm, that lets you move it.
The right parietal also “tips off” the cerebellum that this type of task is being obeyed; in other words, a
type of feedback loop. When the arm is amputated, the motor system doesn't exactly know it's being
amputated. The command itself is monitored in the parietal lobe that the arm is actually moving.
However, there's also been about 1/3 of patients that have said that their phantom limb is immovable, or
in a very hurtful, awkward position. Phantom limb being paralyzed: one of the things he found is that
they had a real arm in a sling from a pitiful nerve injury. And now, to relieve the patient of the pain, the
arm was amputated; however, the patient still feels that the arm is still in a hurtful position, and now
their phantom limb is still paralyzed. Very, very interesting. To help with the pain, Dr. R. takes a mirror
parallel to the arm that's still remaining, which can give the visual effect of seeing a left arm, while it's
just the mirror image of the right arm. With this, the patient is now getting visual feedback of the left
arm. Here, Dr. R. tells the patient to move his arm, which he's now able to move when his eyes are
opened. The patient is now able to relieve the pain of his phantom limb being in a hurtful position for
some time.
Dr. R. also attributes much of these sensations to the somatosensory map of the human. It was a
very interesting lecture – he gives a lot of data from his experiments and explanations of syndromes,
feedback regulation, and the semantics of human cognition.