The Hindu : Tamil Nadu / Chennai News : Empirical answers to metaphysical questions

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Tuesday, Jul 15, 2008
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Empirical answers to metaphysical questions

Staff Reporter

Lecture by neurologist V.S. Ramachandran deals with phantom limbs, Synesthesia

— Photo: R. Ragu

SCIENTIFIC POINT OF VIEW: Neurologist V.S. Ramachandran (centre) with students at the Asian College of Journalism in Chennai on Monday.

CHENNAI: All the questions that great poets have raised, such as ‘What is poetry?’ and ‘What is a metaphor?’ can be answered from a scientific, empirical point of view, neurologist V.S. Ramachandran said on Monday.

He was delivering the inaugural lecture at the Asian College of Journalism here.

Addressing the class of 2009, Dr. Ramachandran, director of the Centre for Brain and Cognition and professor in the Psychology Department and neurosciences programme at the University of California, San Diego, spoke largely about the key areas of his research: phantom limbs and Synesthesia.

As for phantom limbs, a neurological condition, he said: “When a patient loses his arm in an accident, he knows it is not there anymore, but there is this vivid, compelling, illusion that it is there.” Specific parts of the brain receive inputs pertaining to specific body parts. In the case of a patient who experiences a phantom limb, that part of the brain which is used to receiving inputs from the arm, now amputated, is hungry for inputs.

Some patients also suffer from acute pain owing to the paralysis of their phantom limb. To treat this condition of “learned paralysis,” Dr. Ramachandran pioneered the “mirror box.”

If a person’s left arm was amputated, he or she would be made to put the right hand in front of the mirror. “We ask the patients to move both their hands (the right hand and its mirror image) synchronously and make them unlearn their learned paralysis,” he said. This exercise was also helpful in stroke rehabilitation.

Synesthesia is the condition in which numbers are seen in colours or a certain colour is seen every time a certain note is heard. When the possible causes for this condition were analysed, four theories came up. One, the people who claimed to see numbers in colours were crazy, or some drug possibly evoked that response, or it was a result of memory (repeated association of a colour to a number), or it was said that those with the condition were being metaphorical, Dr. Ramachandran said. “But in science, we don’t explain one mystery with another.”

Sashi Kumar, chairman, Media Development Foundation, who welcomed the new batch of students, introduced Dr. Ramachandran and said he was the grandson of late Alladi Krishnaswamy Iyer, member of the Constituent Assembly that framed India’s Constitution.

The current batch has nearly 120 students who will specialise in the print, broadcast, radio or new media streams.

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