Secrets of the Mind Nova HD 1080p

Graham Young is blind, yet he can see.

Derek Steen feels pain in an arm that no longer exists.

John Sharons sometimes believes he is god.

My attitude was I was god and that I had heaven and hell in my eyes. I was the grand guy that created heaven and hell.

David Silvera is convinced his parents are imposters.

It could look like my father, it could look identical to him, exactly like him but it’s not him.

These people are not crazy.

They have all suffered damage in tiny sections of their brains that has profoundly distorted the way they perceive themselves, and the world around them.

In the past, these bizaar cases would have been dismissed by science.

But today, one neuroscientist tracks them down with the dogged persistence of a detective.

What excites me is I can go in there and pretend I’m Sherlock Holmes and try and figure out what has gone wrong in this patient’s brain.

What’s changed that accounts for the strange symptoms?

And, this of course is a lot of fun to do because you’re learning a lot about the brain, learning a lot about what causes the symptoms in that particular patient.

But, more importantly, it’s telling about how the normal human brain works.

And how the activity of the neurons in the normal brain gives rise to conscious experience, and gives rise to the whole spectrum of abilities that we call human nature.

Can the misfortune of brain injury shed light on the workings of the normal brain?

Perhaps even solve some of the eternal riddles of human nature.

Understanding the human brain is one of the ultimate challenges in science.

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And by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting

and from contributions from your PBS your station from viewers like you.

Thank you.

Watch my two fingers. Do you see my two fingers?

Dr. Vilimer Ramachandran is revolutionizing our understanding of how the brain works.

His efforts to solve some of the most baffling neurological mysteries take him from the hospital bed to the outer limits of brain science.

The human brain is without any doubt the most complexly organized form of matter in the universe.

The brain is made up of one-hundred billion nerve cells, or neurons.

Someone has calculated that the number of possible permutations and combinations of brain activity exceeds the number of elementary particles in the universe.

And this gives you some idea of the staggering complexity one is faced with in trying to understand the functions of this mysterious organ.

So the question is: how do you even begin?

Ramachandran began his investigations with a strange phenomenon called phantom limb syndrome.

It’s not uncommon for amputees to feel the vivid presence of a missing limb, long after it is gone.

One of Ramachandran’s first patients was Derek Steen.

Thirteen years ago, I was involved in a motorcycle accident, and I pulled the nerves out of my spinal cord up in my neck.

They told my parents directly that I would never use my arm again.

About seven years ago, I was reading through the classifieds, and I saw an ad in there: Amputees Wanted.

I thought it was a joke.

It’s just basically connecting the club to the ball.

So I called the number and it was Dr. Ramachandran.

Today, Derek is teaching Ramachandran how to play golf.

But several years ago, Derek made a crucial contribution to Ramachandran’s pioneering work in brain science.

After my surgery, I sat up in the bed, and I still felt the arm there, still felt everything there, and I’m looking down and I’m seeing nothing.

It was pretty bizaar.

The more I thought about it, the more it hurt.

The more it hurt, the more I thought about it, so it was like, it was never-ending.

I mean, I’d break out in a cold sweat and turn pale just standing here talking to you because the pain would hit so bad.

If there is any one thing about our existence that we take for granted, it’s the fact that we have a body.

Each of us has a body, and, I mean, you give it a name. It has a bank account, and so on and so forth.

But it turns out, even the body is something you construct in your mind, and this is what we call your body image.

Now of course, in my case, it’s substantiated by the fact that there really is a body, bone, and tissue.

But the sense that I have, the internal sense I have of the presence of a body and arms and all of that is, of course, constructed in my brain, and it’s in my mind.

And the most striking evidence for this comes from these patients who have had an amputation and continue to feel the presence of the missing hand.

It was the beginning of an important relationship.

Important for Derek, because not only would he finally understand his phantom pain,

he would also get to the bottom of a mysterious sensation he felt while shaving.

When I first started shaving after my surgery, I would feel

my absent hand start to hurt and tingle whenever I shaved this left side of my face.

Meeting Derek was important for Ramachandran because the explanation he came up with would rock the world of neuroscience.

How about that?

That’s just my arm.

The first thing Ramachandran did was to invite Derek to his lab for a simple test.

Derek, I want to touch different parts of your body, and I just want you to tell me what you feel,

and where you experience the sensation. Ok? Close your eyes.

I could feel that on my forehead.

Anything anywhere else?

No.

Ok.

It’s on my nose.

Ok.

My chest.

Your chest. Ok.

I can feel that on my cheek and I can feel rubbing on the phantom left hand.

On the phantom left hand in addition to your cheek?

Mhmm.

I’m going to run the q-tip across your jaw and see what happens.

I can feel the q-tip on my cheek and I can feel a stroking sensation across the phantom hand.

You actually feel it stroking across your phantom hand across the palm?

So here is a medical mystery of sorts: why does this happen?

Why would a person, when you touch his face, claim that it is also touching his missing phantom fingers?

This was just the kind of mystery that Ramachandran was drawn to.

Although it would take some time to solve.

One day, while Derek was making one-armed repairs on his favorite Chevy, Ramachandran turned up with his solution.

It was a ground-breaking theory.

The reason we think it happens is that in your brain there is a complete map of the surface of the body.

The entire left side of my body, the skin surface is mapped onto the right side of my brain on the vertical strip of cortex, which we call the somatosensory cortex.

Similarly, the right side of my body is represented on the left side of my brain.

So, every point on your body surface has a corresponding point on this body map.

Now, it turns out that the representation of the face on this map is right next to the representation of the hand.

Now that’s a bit surprising, as you’d expect the map to be continuous and fatefully represent the left side of my body.

But it doesn’t.

Now imagine what would happen if the left arm were amputated.

The part of the brain corresponding to the hand no longer gets any input,

and it’s hungry for new sensory input, so to speak.

The sensory signals from the face normally activate only the face area that’s right next to the hand area,

but they now invade the vacated territory corresponding to the missing hand, and start activating the hand region in the brain.

And so whatever is reading those signals higher up misinterprets those signals.

It says those signals are coming from the missing hand.

So you experience the sensation that’s coming from the missing fingers even though I’m touching your face.

This is showing there’s been a massive reorganization of the sensory pathways in your brain after the amputation.

And it’s as though there has been a cross-wiring in your brain.

Exactly.

At first, some members of the neuroscience community scoffed at Ramachandran’s new theory that neuro pathways in the brain can change.

One of the dogmas in neurology is that there’s always the connections that are laid down in the fetus and in early infancy,

and once these connections are laid down, there’s nothing you can do to change them.

As a scientist, Ramachandran knew that such a radical proposal needed scientific proof.

It was time to give Derek a brain scan.

Hopefully, this would show what was actually going on in his brain.

But would it prove that Ramachandran’s hunch was correct?

When various parts of Derek’s body were wired up, the corresponding activity in his brain revealed the layout of his body map.

This is a scan of Derek's brain.

The green spot shows the brain’s response to the stimulation of Derek’s existing right hand.

Next to it, the red spot shows that the right side of Derek’s face is also being stimulated.

So far, everything is normal.

But in the right hemisphere, the green spot has disappeared

because Derek’s missing left arm can no longer send signals to his brain.

Remarkably, the red spot, which corresponds to his left cheek, has now taken over the whole space.

These results vindicated Ramachandran's detective work.

It’s as though now the sensory input from the face is innervating a completely new part of the brain,

and this means new pathways have been opened up.

Whether this is because there has been an actual sprouting of new nerve fibers

or there have been pre-existing silent pathways which are now suddenly active, we’re still working on.

We suggested that maybe the connections are already there like reserve troops ready to be called into action,

and when you amputate the hand, these latent connections suddenly become active.

Phantom sensations do not only occur in the limbs.

But in fact, you can get a phantom with almost any part of the body.

You can get phantom menstrual cramps after hysterectomy;

you can get phantom appendix pain even after the appendix has been removed.

Theoretically you could have a phantom of almost any part of the body, except, of course, the brain.

You can’t have a phantom brain, by definition, because that’s why we think it’s all happening.

Luckily for Derek, his phantom pain has subsided.

But that’s not always the case.

James Peacock has suffered excruciating pain since he lost his hand six years ago.

A few days after I woke up, you know, it might have been a week to eight or nine days,

something like that before the pain really started getting bad.

You know, until it was like your hand is just clinched up real tight and stuff, or balled-up, you can’t move it.

To unclench it, it’s just, you can’t…

This raises the perplexing clinical problem: how do you treat pain in a body part that’s missing?

James tried everything from painkillers to hypnotism. But nothing worked.

… until I found out about the mirror box…

It was then that he came to see Ramachandran.

One answer might be that the brain is sending signals to the arm and trying to clench it,

but in you and me there’s muscles going back from the muscles

in the hand telling you you’re clenching too much or too fast,

and this damps the command signals so you can slow down.

But the patient has no feedback because he doesn’t have an arm.

So the brain sends even more signals, ok,

and this goes on and you get into sort of a positive feedback loop.

So I said, if you give him some sort of other source of feedback,

such as visual feedback, maybe that will trick the brain

into thinking that the hand is clenching or unclenching, and maybe you can interrupt this loop.

So I said, why don’t we put a mirror there and have James look inside the mirror.

So it’s as though you have visually resurrected the phantom limb.

And of course, the patient knows it’s an illusion, but it’s very, very compelling.

Right now as you look in there and you move your hand, your phantom does the same thing as your left hand is doing.

The first time that I got in here and I’d done this, it was like it relieved the phantom pain

and unclenched it and it was just so intriguing, you know, and sometimes it’s hard to explain how you just felt, you know.

Ramachandran believes the mirror box needs to be evaluated with many patients before he can be sure that it really works.

But its undeniable success in uncramping James’ hand suggests that even pain can be a construct of the mind.

The phenomenon of phantom limbs reveals how our brains can delude us into being conscious of something that isn’t there.

But Ramachandran has come across an even stranger condition:

a remarkable ability of the brain that allows you to see even though you are totally blind.

This rare condition is called blind sight.

Ramachandran found Graham Young in Oxford, England.

He’s one of the world’s few known blind sight patients.

This paradoxical condition shows just how much our brains run our lives without our being aware of it.

When I was 8 when I had the accident, it was a road accident that caused the brain damage,

and I literally used to walk into lampposts.

I ran into, you know, these huge, great pillars you get in stations.

I ran into one of those one day.

The main visual centers in humans occupy nearly half the brain in a large region towards the back of the head.

Graham’s vision was devastated by the accident.

Today, he can see to the left, but is blind to everything on the right in both eyes.

If you put an object into part of the field and ask him what is it, he has no idea.

He cannot perceive it consciously

And yet, the remarkable thing is, if you move this object, he will tell you which direction it is moving even though he cannot see the object.

… up. Down.

You can see things over here?

Oh yeah, I can see that.

I’m going to move my hand across. You tell me when it appears, when it comes into view.

Now.

Very precisely as it enters the seeing part of your view.

And if I just hold over here and you look there you can’t see anything?

No.

How about now?

You’re moving it up and down.

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 I say that, you’re going to say ‘ah, he can see!’ No I can’t.

Colin Blakemore is an Oxford scientist for whom Graham’s mysterious abilities raise intriguing questions about consciousness.

I mean, blind sight is extraordinary when you see it.

It’s shocking.

I think it’s shocking because it brings home the fact that we can actually manage our brains without consciousness to some extent.

But that leads to the question, well then, why not everything?

Why do we need consciousness for certain things?

What is the extra gloss the consciousness gives, if anything to our actions?

Right. And wear off individual functions of sight.

Sometimes I am aware of a motion, but that motion has no shape, no color, no depth, no form, no contrast.

Sometimes I can tell you what orientation it’s at, but then we lose everything else.

So what you like is the ability to put it all together, and to recognize an object, a thing.

Something with meaning.

Well blind sight is this term introduced by Larry Wisegrant to describe the ability of people like Graham to detect things, but not to be aware of them.

So, very, very different from what we would normally call vision.

If there’s one thing that the phenomenon of blind sight teaches us, it is that vision is not entirely seeing,

that there can be a disconnection from the capacity to respond to visual information,

and the actual act of being visually aware of something.

Those two things can be visually separated and probably are in our everyday lives.

But the problem is that obviously we’re not aware of the things we’re not aware of – we just don’t know the extent to which they play a part.

It’s almost as though the patient is using ESP, he can see and yet cannot see.

So it’s a paradox, it’s almost like science fiction. How is this possible?

Well if you look at the anatomy, you can begin to explain this curious syndrome.

It turns out, from the eyeball to the higher centers in the brain where you interpret the image,

there’s not just one pathway, there are two separate pathways which sub-serve different aspects of vision.

One of these pathways is the evolutionarily new pathway, the more sophisticated pathway,

if you like, that goes through the eyeball, to the thalamus to the visual cortex of the brain.

Now, you’ll need the visual cortex for consciously seeing something.

The other pathway, which is older evolutionarily, and is more prominent in animals like rodents, lower mammals, bugs, and reptiles,

goes to the brainstem, the stock on which the brain sits.

And from the brainstem gets relayed, eventually, to the higher centers of the brain.

Specifically, the older pathway going through the brainstem is concerned with reflexive behavior,

oriented to something important in the visual field.

Making eye movements, directing your gaze, directing your head toward something important.

These patients, one of these pathways alone is damaged, the visual cortex is damaged.

Because that’s gone, the patient doesn’t see anything consciously, but the other pathway is still intact.

And he can use that pathway to guess correctly the direction of movement of an object that he cannot see.

Graham’s vision is similar to that of reptiles who depend on unconscious blind sight for their survival.

… doesn’t actually have to catch a fly to recognize a fly, it just has to be aware of something moving.

So I suppose that man and lizards are distant cousins.

One of the goals of neuroscience is to understand which parts of the brain are dedicated to what function,

how different mental capacities map onto different pathways and different neural circuits in the brain.

And surely this fascinating syndrome is going to help us understand not only the nature of seeing,

not only the division of labor in these different pathways, but the question of what is consciousness.

What does it mean to be consciously aware of something?

Why is one pathway alone conscious, but the other pathway behaves like a zombie that’s trapped inside him that’s unconscious.

The syndrome is so strange that when it was initially reported, people didn’t believe, and there are some people that still don’t believe it.

But, 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.

For example, as I am driving this car and having this conversation,

all my attention is on the conversation, on the person next to me, and 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.

That’s all being done in parallel by that part of my brain, and it never emerges into conscious awareness,

unless something very strange happens, like a big truck passes by I might notice it.

Blind sight enables us to steer our way successfully through the world as if on auto-pilot.

How are we on the right side?

Without this zombie in our brains, we’d be swamped by visual information, unable to focus on what really matters.

Unlike Graham, Peggy Palmer has normal vision.

She should be able to copy this star easily, but something odd is happening:

one whole side of the star is missing. Peggy has a condition called visual neglect.

Although her eyesight is fine, half of her visual world no longer seems to matter.

Ten years ago, Peggy suffered a stroke in the parietal lobes of her brain.

The parietal lobes are concerned, mainly, with creating a three-dimensional representation of the spatial layout of the world,

allowing a person to walk around, to navigate, to avoid bumping into things.

When the right parietal is damaged, the patient is unable to deal with the left side of the world.

This condition has fascinated neurologists for more than a century,

because it reveals not only how the brain shapes the way we perceive space in the present,

it even determines the spatial look of memories.

This became apparent when Peggy was asked to draw a daisy from memory.

For neuropsychologist Peter Halligan, Peggy’s drawings reveal exactly what’s gone wrong.

It’s like a radar system whereby the actual radar system on the lefthand side is no longer working well.

If someone comes in on my left hand side now, or I hear a sound, my eyes will immediately move to the left hand side.

That makes me, for evolutionary purposes, very aware of my environment, because if I wasn’t aware of those things, I’d have accidents.

I’d get hurt, or I might get eaten by wild animals and whatever.

Now in Peggy’s case, she will not attend to those things that we will normally be aware of.

Peggy things she’s drawn her daisies right, until it’s pointed out to her.

You noticed that, didn’t you?

Oh, dear.

So what Peggy has drawn for us is several nice daisies with the left side missing. Same with this one, and this one, and look at this one. This is a very good example.

I’ve done it on all of them. Sorry!

Which means she’s not only neglecting events in the world, but when she conjures up a mental image,

she’s ignoring the left side of that mental image.

Well I thought I was going all the way around, you see?

And this shows you that this is not simply sensory problem but a problem of consciousness.

It’s ‘cause I was so concentrated on that side, it takes everything away.

You see, this is attention, really. It’s taken away. There must be two attentions somewhere

in your body that one side is taking the other one away. I can’t make it out at all. Very odd.

Peggy’s one-sided daisies graphically reveal how damage to the visual centers can warp our

consciousness of the world, and how complex the human visual system actually is.

When I was a medical student, I was taught there’s an area in the back of the brain called the visual cortex,

and that’s where seeing takes place. But since then, we have learned that in fact, there’s not just one, there are thirty areas in the brain concerned with just seeing.

For Ramachandran, a walk through this Southern Californian mall shows exactly what these visual areas have evolved for.

And maybe these different visual areas are specialized for different aspects of vision.

One area for seeing colors, another area for seeing movement, for form and shape, relative distance and depth.

Now despite this staggering complexity with all these different areas, there seems to be a simple overall pathway or organization.

In fact, the visual information as it comes in seems to divide into two parallel streams of processing.

There is one pathway which we call the ‘how’ pathway, to which some of these areas belong, and that how pathway seems to be concerned mainly with navigation,

with being able to walk around, avoid bumping into obstacles, avoiding uneven terrain, reaching out and grabbing something.

The how pathway leads from the main visual areas to the parietal lobes at the top of the brain, where Peggy suffered her stroke.

The other pathway, the ‘what’ pathway, leads from the main visual areas to the temporal lobes, located just behind our temples.

The what pathway is concerned with recognizing the object. What am I looking at?

What does it mean for me?

Is this an edible object?

Is it a flower?

Is it a person’s face?

What is it that I’m looking at, and what does it mean for me?

That’s what the what pathway is concerned with, and it’s that pathway that seems to be damaged in David.

David presented Ramachandran with one of the strangest cases he has ever encountered.

Two years ago, David was involved in a terrible car accident, while driving back to California from Mexico.

There was a problem with the car and I learned it in the highway with my head first.

For five weeks, David lay in a coma. Serious injuries led to the loss of his right arm,

but to everyone’s relief, when he regained consciousness his mental capacities seemed to be intact.

He was articulate, he was intelligent, not obviously psychotic or emotionally disturbed.

He could read a newspaper, everything seemed to be fine, except he had one profound delusion:

he would look at his mother, and he would say ‘this woman, doctor, she looks exactly like my mother,

but in fact, she’s not my mother, she’s an imposter. She is some other woman pretending to be my mother.’

The injury to David’s brain had brought on a very rare condition called the Capgras Delusion.

I was cooking dinner and he probably didn’t like the food that night and he said, you know,

‘the lady that comes in the morning, she cooks much better than you.

It’s that lady, I like that lady very much.’ And the lady was me of course, all the time.

David was also convinced that his father was an imposter.

He would say to his dad ‘you know, I’m sure you would like to meet this guy.

He’s so much like you, but he drives better. He doesn’t go so fast.’

It can look identical to him, exactly like him, but it’s not him.

After two months of this disturbing behavior, David’s parents decided to seek help from Ramachandran.

But when you looked at your – the person will look like your father, what was your feeling?

Did it look like some other person that resembles your father?

Is it not really your father, something like that?

Exactly. It’s a difference in the fact that I know that person happens not to be my father.

It is not my father or my mother. I don’t expect things from that person as I would expect from my parents.

David not only had delusions about people, he also believed that the house that he lived in was just an imitation of his home.

One day he started getting really angry:

‘I want to go to my house. I want to go to David’s house’ and we’re in the apartment, and just going ‘what am I going to do?’

So I said ‘ok David, let’s go.’ So I took him down the stairs, and I went around through the back,

came back through the elevator, took him to the same apartment, and I said ‘this is your house.’

And I opened the door and said ‘ok, chow’ and I just left him there alone and it was the same apartment.

He looked and he said ‘oh yes, this is my apartment.’

Things like that would happen, and maybe a few days after he would start the same: ‘I want to go to my house. David’s house. This is not David’s house.’

Amazingly, David sometimes referred to himself as the other David, as if his own self was the imposter

The Capgras delusion has been known since the turn of the century, but has been treated as a curiosity, an anomaly.

The standard explanation, which you find in most psychiatry textbooks, is a Freudian one, and the idea of something like this,

this young man, like most young people, when he was an infant growing up, he had strong sexual attraction to his mother – the so-called Freudian Oedipus Complex.

But then along comes a blow to the head, and then suddenly and inexplicably, these sexual urges come flaming to the surface and he finds himself sexually attracted to his mother,

and he says ‘my god, if this is my mother how am I attracted to her? How come I’m aroused?

This must be some other strange woman.’

Now this is an ingenious explanation, but it doesn’t quite work because I’ve seen a patient who has the same delusion about his pet dog.

He’ll look at his pet dog and say ‘doctor, this is not FeFe.

It looks just like FeFe, but in fact, it’s been replaced by another identical dog.’

So how does a Freudian explanation account for this, unless you start talking about the inherent bestiality in all human beings or something like that?

So what really causes Capgras delusion?

Well it turns out that when you look at an object the message goes to the temporal lobes, to the visual centers in the temporal lobes, but seeing is a multi-level process.

After you’ve recognized it, you also need to respond to the object emotionally.

This is obvious when you look at a Picasso or a Rembrandt or any beautiful picture.

Even when you look at, say, your mother’s face, the appropriate emotional warmth has to be evoked.

Or, if you look at a lion you have to be afraid, and all of this is part of the visual process, but happening in a different part of the brain.

Whenever we look at an object or a face, the message reaches the temporal lobes,

where it is identified, but then, it gets relayed to a structure called the amygdala,

which is the gateway to the limbic system that contains the emotional centers of the brain,

and it’s here that we generate the appropriate emotional response to whatever it is we’re looking at.

Now, what I’ve suggested is that what’s going on in this patient is the message gets to the

temporal lobe cortex so the patient recognizes his mother as being his mother and evokes the

appropriate memories, but the message doesn’t get to the amygdala because the fibers going

from the temporal cortex to the amygdala and the emotional centers are cut as a result of the accident.

Therefore, there is no emotion, there is no warmth, and he says ‘if this is really my mother, why is it I am not experiencing any emotions?

There’s something not quite right here. Maybe she’s some other strange woman pretending to be my mother.’

Ramachandran’s hunch that David’s delusions were being caused by the rupture of specific brain circuits

was lent unexpected weight when David’s mother recalled a breakthrough with the phone…

We got so tired of him saying ‘you’re not my dad – you’re my dad – you’re not my mother – you’re my mother’

we decided, okay hey, you go downstairs call on the phone and say ‘David, hi’ and on the phone he would know it was his dad.

He would never ever have this problem.

So on the phone he would always recognize… as his father?

No problem.

When he saw him in person he said ‘you look like my father, but you’re not my father’?

This shows the patient is not crazy. Why would he be crazy in person, but not on the phone?

The answer is, there is a separate pathway that goes from the auditory cortex, the hearing

part of the temporal lobe, to the amygdala, and that pathway was NOT damaged in David by the car accident.

Therefore, when he listens to his father on the phone, there is no delusion.

This is a lovely example of how you can take completely bazar neurological syndrome, maybe from the x-files of neurology

which no one really understood, a person claiming that his mother is an imposter.

And then, come up with a very detailed explanation in terms of the known anatomy of the brain,

saying here’s where the flaw is, and then doing an experiment that takes just an hour to do and showing that this is what’s gone wrong in this patient.

To test his theory about the Capgras Delusion,

Ramachandran arranges to measure David’s galvanic skin response, which is the basis of the lie-detector test.

If David’s brain were normal, he would react emotionally to this picture of his father.

This, in turn, would stimulate an almost indiscernible increase in sweat on his skin and a heightening of electrical resistance that can be measured.

The prediction is that when people with normal brains look at photographs of people they don’t know, they will not respond emotionally,

so there will be no change in skin resistance, but a familiar face will prompt an emotional response, and invariably there is a change.

Now, the question is, what happens with David?

If Ramachandran’s theory is correct, pictures of his parents will not evoke an emotional response.

So the line should remain flat.

Now, this is also telling you about how all of us, how normal people, respond to faces and to objects,

because what happens with this patient is truly extraordinary: the lack of emotional response actually leads him

to this very profound delusion that this person is not really his mother.

In other words, the lack of the autonomic gut reaction, his emotional response leads him to an absurd conclusion, overriding what his intellect is telling him,

and this tells you how closely linked your intellectual view of the world is to your basic emotional reactions to the world.

Luckily for Capgras patients, the condition seems to heal itself. David no longer thinks his mother is an imposter.

And the man who looks like his father is his father and triggers the flow of all the old familiar feelings.

David’s lack of emotional response showed just how crucial emotions are to the recognition process of the normal brain.

But what would happen if the emotions were to run out of control?

What affect might an excess of emotion have on the way we interpret the world? John Sharron has temporal lobe epilepsy.

The seizures involve my person, and my soul, and my spirit, all of it.

When I get one of those feelings, my whole body just tingles and I’m like that’s that.

John’s epileptic seizures are essentially an electrical storm in his temporal lobes, when a group of neurons starts firing at random out of sync with his brain.

Recently, John experienced one of his worst episodes to date.

He’d gone out to the desert with a girlfriend and they’d both got very drunk, with disastrous results.

John was suddenly hit with a volley of seizures.

Each one lasted about 5 minutes and involved violent convulsions that left him unconscious.

Eventually, John managed to get a call through to his father, who drove out to the desert to bring him home.

On the way home, him and I just got into some philosophical, you know, questions about everything

and I would just not shut up on the way home. I was going and going. It’s like I was wired.

It’s basically an earthquake within the body, and like any earthquake there are aftershocks, and like any earthquake that does damage, things have to be rebuilt.

Things have to subside. Mainly what I deal with is the aftermath, particularly with this last episode.

It was very much so like stepping into a Salvidor Dolly painting, okay? Instantly everything was surreal.

And that’s, in essence, what his seizures are all about, the aftermath;

where it puts his brain, where it puts his memory, where it puts his mind, his thinking ability, everything else.

When John’s seizures came to an end, he was exhausted, but he felt omnipotent.

I went running down the streets screaming that I was god, and then this guy came out

and I just pelvic thrusted him and his wife and I was like ‘you wanna effing bet I ain’t god?’

And I said, literally, ‘you asshole, get back in here.

What do you think you’re doing? You’re disturbing the neighbors.

They’re going to call the cops! What is this all about?’

I kind of just looked at him cool and calm and apologized to him and I’m like

‘no, no one is going to call the police.’

I didn’t say this last part, but I’m thinking to myself ‘no one is going to call the police on god.’

John had never been religious, yet the onset of his seizures triggered overwhelming spiritual feelings.

It had been known for a long time that some patients with seizures originating in the temporal lobes have intense religious auras, intense experience of god visiting them.

Sometimes it’s a personal god. Sometimes it’s a more diffuse feeling of being one with the cosmos.

Everything seemed suffused with meaning.

The patient will say ‘finally, I see what it’s all really about, doctor. I really understand god.

I understand my place in the universe and the cosmic scheme.’

Why does this happen? And why does it happen so often in patients with temporal lobe seizures?

Ramachandran met John shortly after the episode in the desert.

He was still feeling the extreme highs and lows that follow his seizures.

Ramachandran was about to witness the emotional intensity that John endures.

I’ve been in so much pain that I’d rather be shot. That or just whipped to death.

Also so much joy that I’d rather be left alone.

Take everything away and just let me sit there and have that much joy.

I feel like I can float and stuff sometimes. It’s like, it’s the best.

There were times when he’d have 7 or 8 grand mal seizures in a day.

He would never come back to this reality during that time.

I have looked in his eyes in those times and I have seen a cry for help.

No you guys, I mean, that’s the thing though.

A lot of other people can just walk around and see the beauty of the world. I can… sorry.

It’s not as beautiful.

He has a seizure, he’ll want to talk philosophy.

He’ll want to discuss all the things that are floating around in this stew he’s got up there and he’s trying to reconstruct thoughts

that he may have had just floating through his mind while he was in his seizure mode, may come surfacing.

But also you’ve said he’s become more emotional because of the seizures, so that’s helpful.

Much more censored - But oddly enough, not in regards to himself, but in regards to atrocities, disasters, things like that. Anywhere and everywhere. Wrongs done to other people.

Oh my god, and you know what, I am so right when in my own head I know I can go out there and get people to follow me.

Not like these wackos with sheets on their heads, not like those idiots, but now it’s just the new generation

of the prophets, and were all the prophets people that were flopping around on the ground? Is that what the whole message was? The gift from the gods this whole time?

That’s possible isn’t it? Yeah.

I’ve never been religious, ever.

People say ‘nope, you can’t see into the future.’ Huh uh.

That’s what that gift is. But you’ve gotta pay for it getting slammed around.

Now, why do these patients have intense religious experiences when they have these seizures?

And why do they become preoccupied with theological and religious matters, even in between seizures?

One possibility is that the seizure activating the temporal lobes somehow creates all these odd, strange emotions in the person’s mind, in the person’s brain.

And this welling up of bizaar emotions may be interpreted by the patient as visits from another world, or as ‘god is visiting me.’

Maybe that’s the only way he can make sense of this welter of strange emotions going on in his brain.

Another possibility is, it has something to do with the way in which the temporal lobes are wired up to deal with the world emotionally.

As we walk around and interact with the world, you need some way of determining what’s important,

what’s emotionally salient, and what’s relevant to you, or if it’s something trivial and unimportant.

How does this come about?

We think what’s critical is the connections between the sensory areas in the temporal lobes and the amygdala, which is the gateway to the emotional centers in the brain.

The strength of this connection is what determines how emotionally salient something is.

And therefore you could speak of an emotional salience landscape with hills and valleys corresponding to what’s important and what’s not important.

In each of us it is slightly different emotional salience landscape.

Now, consider what happens in temporal lobe epilepsy:

when you have repeated seizures, what might be going on is an indiscriminate strengthening of all these pathways.

It’s a little bit like water flowing down all these rivulets along the cliff’s surface.

When it rains repeatedly there’s an increasing tendency for the water to make furrows along one pathway,

and this progressive deepening in the furrows, artificially raises the emotional significance some categories of inputs.

So instead of just finding lions and tigers and mothers emotionally salient, he finds everything deeply salient.

For example, a grain of sand, a piece of driftwood, seaweed, all of this becomes imbued with deep significance.

Now, this tendency to ascribe cosmic significance to everything around you, might be akin to what we call a mystical experience, or a religious experience.

For Ramachandran, John’s story is the basis for one of his most intriguing and controversial theories:

could there be a specialized area of the brain that drives human beings to seek religion?

A few years ago the Popular Press inaccurately quoted me as having claimed that there is a god center, or a g-spot in the temporal lobes.

Now, this is complete nonsense.

There is no specific in the temporal lobe concerned with god,

but it’s possible there are parts of the temporal lobes whose activity is somehow conducive to religious belief.

Now, this seems unlikely, but it might be true.

Why might we have neural machinery in the temporal lobes for belief in religion?

Well belief in religion is widespread.

Every tribe, every society has some form of religious worship, and maybe the reason it evolved, if it did evolve, is that it is conducive to the stability of society.

And this may be easiest if you believe in some sort of Supreme Being.

And that may be one reason why religious sentiments evolved in the brain.

The only reason I probably would get rid of the seizures and epilepsy is because I’ve never even seen ‘em, is because of my family.

Because of him. I would keep them for those visions, because of the way I see the world falling into place and things like that.

It’s a wild little place to be stuck in there. It also seems like a key,

and right now I haven’t learned how to get to the key – use the key without those seizures.

If I was told that I would never have a chance to have that key again, sorry I’m going to hold onto that thing.

Just because some patients with temporal lobe seizures have intense religious experiences,

this does not in any way invalidate that experience for that patient.

In fact, it can very often enrich the patient’s life enormously, and poses a dilemma very often for the physician because what right

do we have to treat the patient with medication or with surgery, thereby, in some instances, depriving him of these valuable experiences?

To me, the exciting thing is that subjects like god and religion can now actually be addressed by us scientists.

We can begin to ask questions about religion and god and begin to approach these questions by listening to these patients, by talking to them and by studying them.

It’s a tragic irony that today’s breakthroughs in the understanding of the human brain are made possible by the misfortune of brain injury.

For centuries, philosophers have labored to understand god, consciousness, and the mysteries of human nature.

Now, perhaps science will have its chance.

On Nova’s website, investigate the remarkable complexity of the mind through other unusual case studies collected by Dr. Ramachandran on pbs.org, or America Online Keyword PBS.

To order this show, or any other Nova program for $19.95 plus shipping and handling, call WGBH Boston Video at 1-800-255-9424.

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