Kerala - Thiruvananthapuram   

A hitchhiker’s guide to the brain

THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: Care for a guided tour of the human brain? Then one cannot do better than attend a talk in Thiruvananthapuram on Tuesday (April 15) by V.S. Ramachandran, one the world’s best-known neuroscientists, who matches his scientific brilliance with easy-to-follow exposition that has captivated audiences around the world.

“It is ironic that even though we now have a vast amount of factual information about the brain ... even the most basic questions about the human mind remain unanswered,” points out the webpage of the Center for Brain and Cognition at the University of California in San Diego, California, the institution of which Dr. Ramachandran is director.

The webpage goes on to pose the questions: “Why do we laugh, i.e., make a rhythmic sound and bob our heads in certain situations? Why do we cry? Why the salty liquid flowing down our cheeks when sad? What is the meaning of art? How does the human brain create and respond to art? Why do we enjoy music? What causes us to dance? What makes some of us so amazingly creative in mathematics, science, and poetry? How are metaphors represented in the brain? What is ‘body image’ and why does it get distorted in anorexia nervosa? How did language evolve? Then there are more basic questions. How do we see color? Why can we pay attention to only one thing at a time? How do we recognize faces so effortlessly?”

If neuroscientists and psychologists have in the past shied away from these sort of questions, the Center and Dr. Ramachandran have earned a reputation for tackling them experimentally. Such research has led to fascinating insights into how the human brain works.

In a programme organised jointly by the State government’s Department of Culture and the Kerala Sangeetha Nataka Akademi at the A.K.G Hall, Dr. Ramachandran will speak on ‘Neuro-aesthetics and Art Appreciation.’ (The talk had earlier been scheduled for January this year, but was postponed.)

“Our ability to perceive the world around us seems so effortless that we tend to take it for granted,” remarked Dr. Ramachandran when he delivered the 2003 Reith Lectures (which were later compiled into a book, ‘The Emerging Mind’). But perception is actually a remarkably complex process.

“We primates are high visual creatures. We have not just one visual area, the visual cortex, but thirty areas in the back of our brains that enable us to see the world. It is not clear why we need thirty areas and not just one,” he pointed out.

Although aesthetic response varied from culture to culture, “universal ‘laws’ of aesthetics may cut across not only cultural boundaries but also species boundaries as well,” observed Dr. Ramachandran in an article written with his wife Diane Rogers-Ramachandran and published in the journal Scientific American Mind in 2006

Dr. Ramachandran will doubtless have more to say on this in the talk, at 10 a.m. on April 15.

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