Walk The Talk: Dr V S Ramachandran (Aired: September 2005)

this is NDTV and you're watching classics he's the director of the Center for brain and cognitive sciences at University of California he's known sometimes to be Sherlock Holmes of the brain one of the brightest minds working on the workings of the human mind he's a philosopher psyche traced you know largest writer physician all rolled into one if I start counting the aboard sees one it'll take too much time but don't be surprised if he is the next Indian to win the Nobel Newsweek already lists him among the hundred people to watch in this century dr. Ramachandran welcome to about the talk thank you very much shaker delighted to be here it's wonderful to be here of the Theosophical society in your hometown of Chennai and in my hometown of Madras Chennai you can almost feel the presence of Krishnamurti spirit here I was you know since I can't match you in terms of intellect or your knowledge of what goes on in the human mind I thought at least make me find ambience to to match the depth of your mind let me also tell you it's a confession my idea of neurosciences is basically the bluefin or the cross and I pop it when I read it well I mean you know that's not unusual its rapidly growing field there's been an explosion of ideas and experiments in this field in the last 10 or 15 years if you go to the annual meeting of the American Society of neuroscience you find last year there were 15,000 papers presented in this one meeting this gives you some idea of the staggering scale of research in this field and just to put it in perspective what's exciting is the fact that if you look at the history of ideas in the last several centuries about that human beings have had about themselves and their place in the cosmos and you find it's being punctuated by what might be called revolutions upheavals and thinking and the most famous of these is was a Copernican revolution the fact that the earth is just a little speck of dust in the cosmos is not the center of the solar system the second revolution is the you can think of it as the DNA revolution the idea that there's no vital spirit that each of us is just a bag of chemicals at least that's what Watson and Crick claimed right but now we are poised for the greatest revolution of all and that is understanding who we are Who am I and even if you go back to ancient Hindu philosophy people talk about Akbar messy and humdrum ask me and all of that but now we can actually get to the physical basis of consciousness self-awareness what it means to be human because ultimately all your Joy's your sorrows your hopes your fears your ambition even what you think of is your own private self inside you is basically just the neurochemical activity of 100 billion little wisps of jelly in your head which we call neurons that's all it is that's what reality is it's the activity of these well it's me that you think that most of the body has not been conquered the brain is the new frontier mind it's the new frontier absolutely right I mean it's amazing that we know so much about for example the functions of the liver right we know it secretes bile it stores glycogen it detoxifies blood from the intestines the portal blah you know what we start to think that might be due to it it can it can too many shots of whiskey of corn produce extensive fibrosis and damage but what I'm saying is we know so much about the liver and you know even the liver has at least twenty or thirty functions each of which can go wrong there are so many types of jaundice for example but with the brain we know so little if there is something wrong if you're thinking the neurologists even a trained neurologist will say you got dementia all the activities of thought are encompassed in one word dementia and this can't be right surely there are dozens and dozens of types of thinking styles of thinking many areas of the brain involved and what's exciting for us is now we can begin to approach these questions and critically by doing research on the brain questions like what do you mean by willing an action what do you mean by self what do you mean by seeing red all of these questions you can begin to answer by looking at the physical structure of the brain but you are you have to answer questions baby laughs baby remember Bob you forget that's correct that's correct now until recently that was not possible right and and people would say well let's wait another 200 years or 300 years before we can begin to approach these questions for example not long ago I saw a patient in India who I was just doing a routine neurological testing taking a needle checking his sensory systems seeing if his pain pathways were in time so part of this is just to take a needle and poke you and you ask you for example you're the patient I say you say ouch ouch you know normally you you say it hurts I mean of course I do it gently and then I test you throughout your body this patient every time I poked them he'd start giggling and laughing saying it feels very funny and I said why are you laughing when I'm poking you with anticipation in Vellore it button below yeah so this is the ultimate I don't even think about it a patient laughing in the face of pain right and in a sense we are all in that predicament here is the pain of existence the pain of the knowledge of certain death but you're laughing so it's the ultimate paradox why would a patient laugh then poke through the needle but it turns out you can figure out why it happened when we did a CT we found here damaged in region Killeen Silla in the brain I think now this region normally receives pain signals goes to the insula from there it goes to the emotional core of the brain called the limbic system from there to the anterior cingulate and then you say ow that's where he experienced the agony of pain right now what happened in this patient was the path the insula itself is normal it's not been damaged by the stroke that's why he can feel the poke of the needle but the wire that goes from the insulin to the limbic structures is damaged so there's been a disconnection between sensory aspects of pain and your emotional experience of agony so in other words even though we think of pain is one thing it's actually has many layers at least two layers one is the sensation and the other is the internal experience of emotion agony so in this chap the pain arrives the brain senses the pain but immediately afterwards you should experience the emotion but there is no emotion because that Wireless cut so as you say human mind has a mind of its own that's correct it can do things unbidden

Channel: NDTV

Views: 17,217

Keywords: NDTV Classics, Walk The Talk, Dr V S Ramachandran, Hindu teachings, NDTV 24x7, Vilayanur S Ramachandran, Sub conscious memory, Hindu Philosophy, Ancient Hindu teachings

Id: UXqiTt9rpqM

Length: 6min 44sec (404 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 22 2013