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  • 6/21/2025

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00:00Graham Young is blind yet he can see Derek Steen feels pain in an arm that no longer exists
00:21John Sharon sometimes believes he is God my attitude was I was God and then I had
00:28heaven and hell in my eyes I was the grand guy who created heaven and hell
00:37David Silvera is convinced his parents are imposters
00:43it can look like my father it can look identical to him exactly like him but it's not him these
00:50people are not crazy they have all suffered damage in tiny sections of their brains that
00:56has profoundly distorted the way they perceive themselves and the world around them in the past
01:03these bizarre cases would have been dismissed by science but today one neuroscientist tracks
01:10them down with the dogged persistence of a detective what excites me is I can go in there and pretend I'm
01:18Sherlock Holmes and try and figure out what has gone wrong in this patient's brain what's changed that
01:25accounts for the strange symptoms and this of course is a lot of fun to do because you're learning a lot
01:31about the brain learning a lot about what causes the symptoms in that particular patient but more
01:36importantly it's telling you about how the normal human brain works and how the activity of neurons in
01:41the normal brain gives rise to conscious experience and gives rise to the whole spectrum of abilities
01:48that we call human nature
01:54can the misfortune of brain injury shed light on the workings of the normal brain perhaps even help
02:00solve some of the eternal riddles of human nature understanding the human brain is one of the ultimate
02:06challenges in science
02:24corporate funding for nova is provided by sprint and the northwestern mutual foundation
02:30additional funding is provided by the park foundation dedicated to education and quality television
02:40and by the corporation for public broadcasting and by contributions to your pbs station from viewers like
02:47thank you thank you
03:05watch my two fingers you see my two fingers
03:08dr villanur ramachandran is revolutionizing our understanding of how the brain works
03:14his efforts to solve some of the most baffling neurological mysteries take him from the hospital bed
03:20to the outer limits of brain science
03:25the human brain is without any doubt the most complexly organized form of matter in the universe
03:33the brain is made up of 100 billion nerve cells or neurons someone has calculated that the number of
03:41possible permutations and combinations of brain activity exceeds the number of elementary particles
03:47in the universe and this gives you some idea of the staggering complexity one is faced with
03:54in trying to understand the functions of this mysterious organ so the question is how do you even begin
04:00ramachandran began his investigations with a strange phenomenon called phantom limb syndrome
04:06it's not uncommon for amputees to feel the vivid presence of a missing limb long after it has gone
04:18one of ramachandran's first patients was derek steen
04:2413 years ago i was involved in a motorcycle accident and i pulled the nerves out of my spinal cord up in my neck
04:31they told my parents directly that i would never use my arm again about seven years ago i was reading
04:40through the classifieds and i saw an ad in there amputees wanted i thought it was a joke
04:47it's just basically connecting the club to the ball so i called the number and it was dr ramachandran
04:54still relaxed today derek is teaching ramachandran how to play golf but several years ago derek made a
05:04crucial contribution to ramachandran's pioneering work in brain science yes that was amazing after my
05:10surgery i sat up in the bed and still felt the arm there still felt everything there and i'm looking
05:16down and i'm seeing nothing it was pretty bizarre the more i thought about it the more it hurt
05:23the more it hurt the more i thought about it so it was it was like it was never ending i mean i'd break
05:28out in a cold sweat and turn pale just standing here talking to you because the pain would hit so bad
05:33if there is any one thing about our existence that we take for granted it's the fact that we have a
05:38body each of us has a body and you know you give it a name it has a bank account and so on and so forth
05:44but it turns out even your body is something that you construct in your mind and this is what we
05:49called your body image now of course in my case it's substantiated by the fact that there really is
05:56a body with bone and tissue but the sense i have the internal sense i have of the presence of a body
06:03and arms and all of that is of course constructed in my brain and it's in my mind and the most striking
06:09evidence for this comes from these patients who have had an amputation and continue to feel the presence of
06:15the missing hand it was the beginning of an important relationship important for derek because
06:26not only would he finally understand his phantom pain he would also get to the bottom of a mysterious
06:32sensation he felt while shaving when i first started shaving after my surgery i would feel my absent
06:44hand start to hurt and tingle whenever i shaved this left side of my face meeting derek was important
06:51for ramachandran because the explanation he came up with would rock the world of neuroscience how about
06:57that that's just my arm the first thing ramachandran did was to invite derek to his lab for a simple test
07:05derek i want to touch different parts of your body and i just wanted to tell me what you feel
07:10and where you experience the sensation okay okay close your eyes
07:16i could feel that on my forehead anything anywhere else no okay
07:20it's on my nose okay my chest your chest okay i can feel that on my cheek and i can feel rubbing
07:32on the phantom left hand on the phantom left hand in addition to your cheek i'm going to run the q-tip
07:38across your jaw and see what happens i can feel the q-tip on my cheek and i can feel a stroking sensation
07:47across the phantom hand you actually feel it stroking across your phantom hand across the palm
07:52so here is a medical mystery of sorts why does this happen why would a person when you touch his
07:57face claim that it was also touching his missing phantom fingers that's fine palm thumb and palm
08:04this was just the kind of mystery that ramachandran was drawn to
08:10although it would take some time to solve
08:11one day while derek was making one-armed repairs on his favorite chevy ramachandran turned up with
08:19his solution it was a groundbreaking theory the reason we think it happens is that in the brain
08:27there is a complete map of the surface of the body the entire left side of my body the skin surface is
08:34mapped on to the right side of my brain along a vertical strip of cortex which we call the somatosensory
08:40cortex similarly the right side of my body is represented on the left side of my brain
08:52so every point on your body surface has a corresponding point on this body map
09:01now it turns out that the representation of the face on this map is right next to the representation of
09:06the hand
09:10now that's a bit surprising as you'd expect the map to be continuous and faithfully represent the left
09:15side of my body but it doesn't
09:20now imagine what would happen if the left arm were amputated the part of the brain corresponding to
09:26the hand no longer gets any input and it's hungry for new sensory input so to speak
09:32the sensory signals from the face normally activate only the face area that's right next to the hand area
09:42but they now invade the vacated territory corresponding to the missing hand and start activating the hand
09:49region in the brain
09:50and so whatever is reading those signals higher up misinterprets those signals it says those
09:59signals are coming from the missing hand so you experience the sensations as coming from the missing
10:04fingers even though i'm touching your face and this is showing there's been a massive reorganization
10:11of the sensory pathways in your brain after the amputation and it's as though there's been a cross
10:16wiring in your brain exactly exactly at first some members of the neuroscience community scoffed at
10:24ramachandran's new theory that neural pathways in the brain can change one of the dogmas in neurology
10:30has always been that connections are laid down in the fetus in an early infancy and once these
10:36connections are laid down there's nothing you can do to change them
10:38as a scientist ramachandran knew that such a radical proposal needed scientific proof
10:47it was time to give derrick a brain scan hopefully this would show what was actually going on in his
10:55brain but would it prove that ramachandran's hunch was correct when various parts of derrick's body were
11:03wired up the corresponding activity in his brain revealed the layout of his body map
11:11this is a scan of derrick's brain the green spot shows the brain's response to the stimulation of
11:17derrick's existing right hand next to it the red spot shows that the right side of derrick's face
11:25is also being stimulated so far everything is normal but in the right hemisphere the green spot has
11:34disappeared because derrick's missing left arm can no longer send signals to his brain
11:41remarkably the red area which corresponds to his left cheek has now taken over the whole space
11:48these results vindicated ramachandran's detective work it's as though now the sensory input from the
11:56face is innervating a completely new part of the brain and this means new pathways have been opened up
12:04whether this is because there's been an actual sprouting of new nerve fibers or there have been
12:09pre-existing silent pathways which are now suddenly active we're still working on
12:14we suggested that maybe the connections are already there like reserved troops ready to be called into
12:22action and when you amputate the hand these latent connections suddenly become active
12:30phantom sensations do not only occur in the limbs but in fact you can get a phantom with almost any part of
12:37the body you can get phantom menstrual cramps after hysterectomy you can get phantom appendix pain even after the appendix has been removed
12:51theoretically you could have a phantom of almost any part of the body
12:57except of course the brain you can't have a phantom brain by definition because that's where we think it's all happening
13:03luckily for derek his phantom pain has subsided but that's not always the case james peacock has suffered
13:14excruciating pain since he lost his hand six years ago a few days after i woke up you know it might have
13:20been under a week to uh eight or nine days something like that before the pain really started getting bad
13:27you know to where it was like your hand is just cringed up real tight and stuff or balled up you know and
13:32you can't move it to unclench it's just you can't you've tried in your mind this raises a perplexing
13:37clinical problem how do you treat pain in a body part that's missing james tried everything from
13:44painkillers to hypnotism but nothing worked until i found out about the mirror box because if you
13:50it was then that he came to see ramachandran one answer might be that the brain is sending signals
13:56to the arm and trying to clench it but in you and me uh there's messages going back from the muscles
14:04of the hand telling you you're clenching too much or too fast and this damps the the command signals
14:11so you can you can slow down but the patient has no feedback because he doesn't have an arm so the
14:16brain says send even more signals okay and this goes on you get into a sort of positive feedback loop
14:22so i said well if you give him some some other source of feedback such as visual feedback maybe
14:27that'll trick the brain into thinking that the hand is clenching or unclenching and maybe you can
14:31interrupt this loop so i said well why don't we put a mirror there and have james look inside the mirror
14:37just as though you have visually resurrected the phantom limb and of course the patient knows it's an
14:42illusion but it's very very compelling right now as you look in there and you move your hand
14:48your phantom does the same thing as your left hand is doing
14:55first time i got in here and i've done this and it was just like it relieved the phantom pain
15:00unclenched it you know it was just oh so intriguing you know sometimes it's just it's hard to explain
15:05how you felt you know ramachandran believes the mirror box needs to be evaluated with many patients
15:12before he can be sure that it really works but its undeniable success in uncramping james's phantom hand
15:20suggests that even pain can be a construct of the mind
15:28the phenomenon of phantom limbs reveals how our brains can delude us into being conscious of something
15:34that isn't there but ramachandran has come across an even stranger condition
15:42a remarkable ability of the brain that allows you to see even though you are totally blind
15:49this rare condition is called blind sight
15:52ramachandran found graham young in oxford england he is one of the world's few known blind sight
16:05patients this paradoxical condition shows just how much our brains run our lives without our being aware
16:12of it well when i when i was eight when i had the accident it was a road accident that caused brain
16:18damage um i literally used to walk into lampposts i ran into you know these huge great pillars you get
16:25in stations i ran into one of those one day the main visual centers in humans occupy nearly half the
16:35brain in a large region towards the back of the head graham's vision was devastated by the accident
16:42today he can see to the left but is blind to everything on the right in both eyes if you put
16:49an object in that part of the field and ask him what is it he has no idea he cannot perceive it consciously
16:58and yet the remarkable thing is if you move this object
17:01he will tell you which direction it's moving even though he cannot see the object
17:05you can see things over here oh yes i can see my hand across you tell me when it appears when you
17:12when it comes into view now very precisely uh as it enters the seeing part of your field if i just
17:21hold over here and you look there you can't see anything no how about now you're moving it up and
17:26down but you're seeing it it's very easy for me to say to you oh i saw that move up colin and as soon as
17:32say i say that you're going to say ah you can see no i can't a hypothesis colin blakemore is an oxford
17:39scientist for whom graham's mysterious abilities raise intriguing questions about consciousness
17:47i mean blindsight is extraordinary when you you see it it's shocking i think it's shocking because it
17:52brings home the fact that we can actually manage our brains without consciousness to some extent and
17:59that leads to the question well then why not everything why not everything and why do we need
18:03consciousness for certain things what is the extra gloss that consciousness gives if anything to our
18:08actions
18:13right i'm aware of individual functions of sight sometimes i'm aware of emotion but that motion has
18:22no shape no color no depth no form no contrast sometimes i can tell you what orientation it's at
18:28but then we lose everything else so what you like is the ability to put it all together and to
18:33recognize an object a thing yeah something with meaning well blindsight is this term introduced by
18:40larry weisgrantz to describe the ability of people like graham to detect things but not to be aware of
18:48them so very very different from what we would normally call vision right if there's one thing that this
18:57phenomenon of blindsight teaches us it is that vision is not entirely seeing that there can be a
19:07disconnection from the capacity to respond to visual information and the actual act of being visually
19:15aware of something those two things could be separated and probably are in our everyday lives but
19:20the problem is that obviously we're not aware of the things that we're not aware of we just don't
19:25know the extent to which they play a part it's almost as if the patient is using esp he can see
19:32and yet cannot see so it's a paradox it's almost like science fiction how is this possible well if
19:39you look at the anatomy you can begin to explain this curious syndrome it turns out from the eyeball to
19:45the higher centers in the brain where you interpret the visual image there's not just one pathway there are
19:52two separate pathways which subserve different aspects of vision one of these pathways is the
20:02evolutionarily new pathway the more sophisticated pathway if you like that goes from the eyeball
20:08through the thalamus to the visual cortex of the brain now you need the visual cortex for consciously
20:17seeing something
20:25the other pathway which is older evolutionarily and is more prominent in animals like rodents lower mammals
20:33birds and reptiles goes to the brain stem the stock on which the brain sits
20:38and from the brain stem gets relayed eventually to the higher centers in the brain
20:48specifically the older pathway going through the brain stem is concerned with reflexive behavior
20:54orienting to something important in the visual field making eye movements directing your gaze directing
20:59your head towards something important in these patients one of these pathways alone is damaged the visual
21:06cortex is damaged because that's gone the patient doesn't see anything consciously but the other
21:12pathway is still intact and he can use that pathway to guess correctly the direction of movement of an
21:19object that he cannot see graham's vision is similar to that of reptiles who depend on unconscious blind
21:27sight for their survival elicit if it wants to catch a fly take them doesn't actually have to see a fly it
21:33doesn't have to recognize the fly it just has to be aware of something moving so i suppose me and the
21:39lizard are distant cousins one of the goals of neuroscience is to understand which parts of the
21:46brain are dedicated to what function how different mental capacities map onto different pathways and
21:53different neural circuits in the brain and surely this fascinating syndrome is going to help us understand
21:59not only the nature of seeing not only the division of labor between these different pathways
22:04but the question of what is consciousness what does it mean to be consciously aware of something
22:08why is one pathway alone conscious but as the other pathway behaves like a zombie that's trapped inside him
22:15that's unconscious
22:18the syndrome is so strange that when it was initially reported people didn't believe it and there are some people who still don't believe it
22:25but it's in a sense it's not that strange if you think about it because in a sense we experience blind sight all the time in our daily lives
22:32for example as i am driving this car and having this conversation all my attention is on the conversation on the person next to me
22:40and in fact i'm not conscious of what's going on around me even though i'm negotiating all this traffic avoiding obstacles avoiding that car on my right avoiding the car on my left
22:51that's all being done in parallel by another part of my brain and it never emerges into conscious awareness
22:57unless something very strange happens like a big truck passes by i might notice it
23:05blind sight enables us to steer our way successfully through the world as if on autopilot
23:10without this zombie in our brains we'd be swamped by visual information unable to focus on what really matters
23:21unlike graham peggy palmer has normal vision she should be able to copy this star easily
23:36i'll never get this star hopefully but something odd is happening one whole side of the star is missing
23:47peggy has a condition called visual neglect although her eyesight is fine half of her visual world no longer
23:56seems to matter
23:59ten years ago peggy suffered a stroke in the parietal lobes of her brain
24:05the parietal lobes are concerned mainly with creating a three-dimensional representation
24:11of the spatial layout of the world allowing a person to walk around to navigate to avoid bumping into things
24:18when the right point is damaged the patient is unable to deal with the left side of the world
24:28this condition has fascinated neurologists for more than a century because it reveals not only
24:34how the brain shapes the way we perceive space in the present it even determines the spatial look of our
24:40memories this became apparent when peggy was asked to draw a daisy from memory
24:48right a daisy it shall be for neuropsychologist peter halligan peggy's drawings reveal exactly what's gone
24:57wrong it's like a radar system whereby the actual radar system on the left hand side is no longer working
25:06well if someone comes in on my left hand side now or i hear a sound my eyes will immediately move to
25:13the left hand side that makes me for evolutionary purposes very aware of my environment because if
25:19i wasn't aware of those things i'd have accidents i get hurt or i might get eaten by wild animals and
25:24whatever now in peggy's case she will not attend to those things that we would normally be aware of
25:31peggy thinks she's drawn her daisies right until it's pointed out to her you've noticed that have
25:40you oh dear so what peggy's drawn for us is several nice daisies with the left side missing
25:48same with this one and this one look at this one this is a very good example
25:52i've done it on all of them which means that she's not only neglecting events in the world but
26:01when she conjures up a mental image she's ignoring the left side of that mental image well i thought
26:07i was going all the way around you see and this shows you that this is not simply a sensory problem
26:13but a problem of consciousness i don't know it's because i was so concentrating on that so it takes
26:20everything away you see is his attention really is taking this taken away this there must be two
26:28attentions somewhere in your body that one side's taking the other one away i can't make it out at all
26:35very odd peggy's one-sided daisies graphically reveal how damage to the visual centers can warp our
26:46consciousness of the world and how complex the human visual system actually is when i was a medical
26:55student i was taught there's an area in the back of the brain called visual cortex and that's where
26:59seeing takes place but since then we have learned in fact there's not just one there are 30 areas in
27:05the brain concerned just with seeing
27:11for ramachandran a walk through this southern california mall
27:15shows exactly what these visual areas have evolved for
27:21and maybe these different areas are specialized for different aspects of vision
27:27one area for seeing colors another area for seeing movement
27:33form and shape relative distance and depth
27:39now despite this staggering complexity of all these different areas there seems to be a simple
27:45overall pattern of organization in fact the visual input as it comes in seems to divide into two
27:53parallel streams of processing there is one pathway which we call the how pathway to which some of these
28:00areas belong and that how pathway seems to be concerned mainly with navigation with being able to walk
28:07around avoid bumping into obstacles be avoiding uneven terrain reaching out and grabbing something
28:16the how pathway leads from the main visual areas to the parietal lobes at the top of the brain where peggy suffered her stroke
28:23the other pathway the what pathway leads from the main visual areas to the temporal lobes located just behind our temples
28:36the what pathway is concerned with recognizing the object what am i looking at what does it mean for me is
28:43this an edible object is it a flower is it a person's face what is it that i'm looking at and what does
28:51it mean for me that's what the what pathway is concerned with and it's that pathway that seems to be damaged in david
29:03david presented ramachandran with one of the strangest cases he has ever encountered
29:08two years ago david was involved in a terrible car accident while driving back to california from mexico
29:18there was a problem with the car and i landed in the highway with my head first
29:28for five weeks david lay in a coma serious injuries led to the loss of his right arm
29:34but to everyone's relief when he regained consciousness his mental capacities seemed to be intact
29:41he was articulate he was intelligent not obviously psychotic or emotionally disturbed
29:48he could read a newspaper everything seemed fine except he had one profound delusion
29:52he would look at his mother and he would say this woman doctor she looks exactly like my mother
29:57but in fact she's not my mother she's an imposter she's some other woman pretending to be my mother
30:05the injury to david's brain had brought on a very rare condition called the capgra delusion
30:11i was cooking dinner and he probably didn't like the food that night and and he said you know the lady
30:17who comes in the morning she cooks much better than you it's a it's that lady i like that lady very much
30:23but the lady was me of course all the time david was also convinced that his father was an imposter
30:34he would say to his dad you know i'm sure you would like to meet this guy he's so much like you
30:40but he drives better he doesn't go so fast it can look identical to him exactly like him but it's not him
30:48after two months of this disturbing behavior david's parents decided to seek help from ramachandran
30:56but when you looked at your the person who looked like your father what was your feeling does it
31:01did it look like there's some other person who resembles your father he's not really your father
31:05something like that exactly there's a difference that the fact that i know that that person happens
31:09not to be my father uh-huh it is not my father or my mother right okay i don't expect things from that
31:16person as i would expect from my parents no i got to coma the teacher today david not only had delusions
31:26about people he also believed that the house that he lived in was just an imitation of his home
31:33one day he started getting really angry i want to go to my house i want to go to david's house i want
31:38to go to david's house and we're in the apartment and i'm just going what am i going to do so i decided
31:45i said okay david let's go so i took him down the stairs and i went around through the back came
31:53back through the elevator took him to bring you know the same apartment and i said this is your
32:00house and i opened the door and i said okay ciao and i just left him there alone it was the same
32:05apartment and he looked at it said oh yes this is my apartment
32:09things like that would happen and and then maybe a few days after he would start the same
32:16i want to go to my house david's house this is not david's house
32:23amazingly david sometimes referred to himself as the other david as if his own self were an imposter
32:31the cop grass delusion has been known since the turn of the century but has been treated as a
32:36curiosity and anomaly the standard explanation which you find in most psychiatry textbooks
32:42is a freudian one and the idea is something like this this young man like most young people when he was
32:50an infant growing up he had strong sexual attraction to his mother the so-called freudian oedipus complex
32:57no i talked to him i said he cannot evaluate me because i'm not playing he said wait you're not
33:04evaluating work or what but then along comes a blow to the head and suddenly and inexplicably these
33:12sexual urges come flaming to the surface and he finds himself sexually attracted to his mother and
33:18he says my god if this is my mother how come i'm attracted to her how come i'm aroused this must be
33:22some other strange woman now this is an ingenious explanation but it doesn't quite work because
33:28i've seen a patient who has the same delusion about his pet dog he'll look at his pet dog and say doctor
33:37this is not fifi it looks just like fifi but in fact it's been replaced by another identical dog
33:43so how does the freudian explanation account for this unless you start talking about the inherent
33:48bestiality in all human beings or something like that so what really causes the cup grass delusion
33:55well it turns out that when you look at an object the message goes to the temporal lobes to the visual
34:01centers in the temporal lobes but seeing is a multi-level process after you've recognized it you also need
34:09to respond to the object emotionally this is obvious when you look at a picasso or a rembrandt or any
34:16beautiful picture even when you look at your mother's face the appropriate emotional warmth
34:23has to be evoked or when you look at a lion you have to be afraid and all of this is part of the visual
34:29process but happening in a different part of the brain whenever we look at an object or a face the
34:39message reaches the temporal lobes where it's identified but then it gets relayed to a structure
34:45called the amygdala which is the gateway to the limbic system that contains the emotional centers
34:50of the brain and it's here that we generate the appropriate emotional response to whatever it is
34:57we're looking at now what i've suggested is that what's going on in this patient is the message gets
35:04to the temporal lobe cortex so the patient recognizes his mother as being his mother and evokes the appropriate
35:11memories but the message doesn't get to the amygdala because the fibers going from the temporal lobe
35:18cortex to the amygdala into the emotional centers are cut as a result of the accident
35:27therefore there is no emotion there is no warmth and he says if this is really my mother
35:33why is it i'm not experiencing any emotions there's something not quite right here maybe see some other
35:38strange woman pretending to be my mother ramachandran's hunch that david's delusions were being caused by
35:44the rupture of specific brain circuits was lent unexpected weight when david's mother recalled a
35:50breakthrough with the phone we got so tired of him saying you're not my dad you're my dad you're not
35:59my mother you're my mother we decided okay you go downstairs call on the phone and said david hi and on the
36:07phone he would know he was his dad on the phone he never ever had this problem had this problem so
36:13on the phone he'll always recognize on the phone as his father as his father no problem when he saw him
36:17in person he would say you look like my father but you know my father no this shows the patient is not
36:24crazy why would he be crazy in person but not on the phone the answer is there's a separate pathway that
36:33goes from the auditory cortex the hearing part of the temporal lobe to the amygdala and that pathway
36:40was not damaged to david by the car accident therefore when he listens to his father on the phone there is
36:45no delusion oh great this is a lovely example how you can take a completely bizarre neurological syndrome
36:54maybe from the x files of neurology which no one really understood a person claiming that his mother is an
37:01imposter and then come up with a very detailed explanation in terms of the known anatomy of the
37:07brain saying here is where the flaw is and then doing an experiment that takes just an hour to do
37:14and showing that this is what's gone wrong in this patient okay are you comfortable
37:20to test his theory about the copgra delusion ramachandran arranges to measure david's galvanic skin
37:27response which is the basis of the lie detector test if david's brain were normal he would react
37:35emotionally to this picture of his father this in turn would stimulate an almost indiscernible
37:41increase of sweat on his skin and a heightening of electrical resistance that can be measured
37:49the prediction is that when people with normal brains look at photographs of people they don't know
37:54they will not respond emotionally so there will be no change in skin resistance but a familiar face will
38:01prompt an emotional response and invariably there is a change now the question is what happens with david
38:11if ramachandran's theory is correct pictures of his parents will not evoke an emotional response
38:17so the line should remain flat now this is also telling you about how all of us of normal people
38:33respond to faces into objects because what happens in this patient is truly extraordinary the lack of
38:40emotional response actually leads him to this very profound delusion that this person is not really
38:46his mother in other words the lack of the autonomic gut reaction this emotional response leads him to an
38:53absurd conclusion overriding what his intellect is telling him and this tells you how closely linked
39:02your intellectual view of the world is to your basic emotional reactions to the world
39:08the world is to the world is to the world is to the world is to the world is to the world is to the world
39:13luckily for cap grab patients the condition seems to heal itself david no longer thinks his mother is an
39:20imposter and the man who looks like his father is his father and triggers the flow of all the old familiar
39:28feelings david's lack of emotional response showed just how crucial emotions are
39:35to the recognition process of the normal brain
39:45but what would happen if the emotions were to run out of control what effect might an excess of emotion
39:52have on the way we interpret the world
39:58john sharon has temporal lobe epilepsy
40:01the seizures involve my person and my soul and my spirit all of it when i get one of those feelings
40:11i like my whole body just tingles and just oh i'm like that's that
40:18john's epileptic seizures are essentially an electrical storm in his temporal lobes when a group of neurons
40:25starts firing at random out of sync with the rest of his brain
40:30recently john experienced one of his worst episodes to date he'd gone out to the desert with a girlfriend
40:37and they both got very drunk with disastrous results john was suddenly hit by a volley of seizures
40:44each one lasted about five minutes and involved violent convulsions that left him unconscious
40:50eventually john managed to get a call through to his father who drove out to the desert to bring him
40:57home on the way home him and i just got into some philosophical you know questions about everything
41:05and i just would not shut up once i got on the way home i was going and going it was like i was wired
41:09it's basically an earthquake within the body and like any earthquake there are aftershocks
41:18and like any earthquake that does damage things have to be rebuilt things have to subside
41:29mainly what i deal with is the aftermath particularly with this last episode
41:36it was very much like stepping into a salvador dali painting okay instantly everything was surreal
41:48and that's in essence what his seizures are all about the aftermath um where it puts his brain where
41:56it puts his memory where it puts his mind his thinking ability everything else
42:00when john's seizures came to an end he was exhausted but he felt omnipotent
42:10i went running down the street screaming that i was god and then
42:14this guy came out and i was just like pelvic thrust at him and his wife and i was like
42:19you want to effing bet i ain't god and i said literally you get back in here
42:27what do you think you're doing you know you're disturbing the neighbors you're going to call
42:31the cops what is this all about i kind of just looked at him cool and calm and apologized to him
42:38and i'm like no one's going to call the police like it i didn't say this last part but i'm thinking
42:44to myself no one's going to call the police on god
42:47john had never been religious yet the onset of his seizures triggered overwhelming spiritual feelings
43:01it has been known for a long time that some patients with seizures originating in the temporal
43:07lows have intense religious auras intense experience of god visiting them sometimes it's a personal god
43:14sometimes it's a more diffuse feeling of being one with the cosmos everything seems suffused with
43:20meaning the patient will say finally i see what it's all really about doctor i really understand god
43:28i understand my place in the universe in the cosmic scheme why does this happen and why does it happen
43:33so often in patients with temporal lobe seizures
43:41ramachandran met john shortly after the episode in the desert he was still feeling the extreme highs and
43:48lows that follow his seizures ramachandran was about to witness the emotional intensity that john endures
43:55i've been in so much pain that i'd rather be shot to death or just whipped to death
44:04but also also joy yeah i've been in so much joy that i would rather
44:12be left alone get take everything away and just let me sit there and have that much joy
44:19i feel like i can float and stuff sometimes you know it's just it's like it's like the best
44:28there were times where he would have seven or eight grand mal seizures in a day
44:33he would never come back to this reality during that time i have looked in his eyes in those times
44:40and i have seen seen a cry for help no i mean you guys that's the thing though a lot of other people
44:51can just walk around and see the beauty of the world i can
44:58sorry it's not as beautiful
45:01he has a seizure he'll want to talk philosophy
45:16you want to discuss all the things that are floating around and this stewie's got up here
45:20that he's trying to reconstruct thoughts that he may have had just just floating through his mind while he
45:26was in a seizure mode may come surfacing i see okay okay so also you said he's become more emotional
45:33because because of the seizure so that's that's helpful too much more sensitive but oddly enough
45:37not in regards to himself okay but in regards to atrocities disasters things like that anywhere and
45:45everywhere wrongs done to other people oh my god and you know what i am so right in my own head i
45:53know i could go out there and get people to follow me not like these wackos with sheets on their heads
45:59not like those idiots right but now it's just the new generation of the prophets and were all the
46:07prophets people that were flopping around on the ground is that what this whole message was the gift
46:12from the gods this whole time that's possible isn't it yeah i've never been religious ever
46:17people say no you can't see into the future that's what that gift is but you gotta pay for it by getting slammed around
46:31now why do these patients have intense religious experiences when they have these seizures
46:39and why do they become preoccupied with theological and religious matters even in between seizures
46:44one possibility is that the seizure activity in the temporal lobe somehow creates all kinds of odd
46:53strange emotions in the person's mind in the person's brain and this welling up of bizarre emotions
47:00may be interpreted by the patient as as visits from another world or as god is visiting me maybe that's
47:07the only way he can make sense of this welter of strange emotions going on in his brain another
47:13possibility is that this has something to do with the way in which the temporal lobes are wired up to deal
47:20with the world emotionally
47:25as we walk around and interact with the world you need some way of determining what's important what's
47:31emotionally salient and what's relevant to you versus something trivial and unimportant
47:36how does this come about we think what's critical is the connections between the sensory areas in the
47:48in the temporal lobes and the amygdala which is the gateway to the emotional centers in the brain
47:53the strength of these connections is what determines how emotionally salient something is
48:05and therefore you could speak of a sort of emotional salience landscape with hills and valleys
48:11corresponding to what's important and what's not important
48:23and each of us has a slightly different emotional salience landscape
48:31now consider what happens in temporal lobe epilepsy when you have repeated seizures
48:36what might be going on is an indiscriminate strengthening of all these pathways
48:41it's a bit like water flowing down rivulets along the cliff surface
48:49when it rains repeatedly there's a increasing tendency for the water to make furrows along one pathway
48:56and this progressive deepening of the furrows artificially raises the emotional significance of some
49:03different categories of inputs so instead of just finding lions and tigers and mothers emotionally salient
49:13he finds everything deeply salient for example a grain of sand a piece of driftwood seaweed all of this
49:19becomes imbued with deep significance
49:22now this tendency to ascribe cosmic significance to everything around you might be akin to what we call
49:38a mystical experience or a religious experience
49:41the world
49:51for ramachandran john's story is the basis of one of his most intriguing and controversial theories
49:59could there be a specialized area of the brain that drives human beings to seek religion
50:03a few years ago the popular press inaccurately quoted me as having claimed that there is a god center
50:13or a g-spot in the temporal lobes and now this is complete nonsense there is no specific area in the
50:18temporal lobe concerned with god but it's possible there are parts of the temporal lobes whose activity
50:25is somehow conducive to religious belief now this seems unlikely but it might be true now why might
50:34we have neural machinery in the temporal lobes for belief in religion well belief in religion is widespread
50:41every tribe every society has some form of religious worship and maybe the reason it evolved
50:48if it did evolve is that it is conducive to the stability of society
50:57and this may be easiest if you believe in some sort of supreme being
51:01and that may be one reason why religious sentiments evolved in the brain
51:07the only reason i probably would
51:10get rid of the seizures and epilepsy because i've never even seen them
51:13it's because of my family because of him i would i would keep them for those visions
51:21because of the way i see the world falling into place and things like that
51:25it's a wild little place to to be stuck in there
51:30it also seems like a key and right now i haven't learned how to get to the key without
51:34use the key without those seizures
51:37if i was told that i'd never have a chance to have that key again sorry i'm gonna hold on to that thing
51:44just because some patients with temporal lobe seizures have intense religious experiences
51:50this does not in any way invalidate that experience for that patient
51:58in fact it can very often enrich the patient's life enormously and it poses a dilemma very often for
52:05the physician because what right do we have to treat the patient with medication or with surgery
52:12thereby in some instances depriving him of these valuable experiences
52:24to me the exciting thing is that subjects like god and religion can now be
52:32actually addressed by our scientists
52:40we can begin to ask questions about religion of god and begin to approach these questions
52:46by listening to these patients by talking with them and by studying
52:57it's a tragic irony that today's breakthroughs in our understanding of the human brain
53:03are made possible by the misfortune of brain injury
53:08for centuries philosophers have labored to understand god consciousness and the mysteries of human nature
53:15now perhaps science will have its chance
53:29on nova's website investigate the remarkable complexity of the mind
53:34through other unusual case studies collected by dr ramachandran on pbs.org or america online keyword pbs
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