Phantoms of the Brain

Probing the Mysteries of the Human Mind

V.S. Ramachandran and Sandra Blakeslee, 1998, Forest Grove Lib, 612.8 RAM

Brief notes ... partly read (40 pages and skimming), not the structural/neurochemistry book I was hoping for.

Quote from Charles Darwin: "False facts are highly injurious to the progress of science for they often endure long; but false hypotheses do little harm, as everyone takes a salutary pleasure in proving their falseness; and when this is done, one path toward error is closed and the road to truth is often at the same time opened."

Fig 2.1 Wilder Penfield's homunculus, mapping of sensation onto the medial surface of the parietal lobe near the top, behind the central sulcus. Approximately where a headphone band goes, wrapped from ear to ear in the coronal plane. The hand and thumb sensations map just above face and lips ...

• That makes sense, because humans, primates, and Euarchontoglire (superprimates) like mice all use their forepaws to eat. The eating and holding systems must be tightly coordinated so you don't bite off your fingers, and that had better be wired in from birth, because that's when we start learning how to eat.

The authors focus on the toes mapping next to the genitals; no evolutionary just-so tale comes to mind, but recreational opportunities do.