Question

Watch the documentary "Secrets of the Mind Nova HD" hosted by Youtube (about 1 hour long). As you watch the video, take careful notes.

Your assignment will be to write an essay discussing 3-4 of the situations/scenarios found in the video. Your discussion should include psychological terminology found in the video. Focus on the parts of the documentary that are especially fascinating to you.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w6AfzCNDmbY

Answer 1

The video shows how a neuroscientist, Dr. Ramachandran, attempts to understand four strange cases of four different individuals who have had damage in a small area of their brain which has, in turn, affected the way they percieve their own selves and the world around them. He explains the complexity of the human brain and the way over a million neurons work together.

The first concept Dr. Ramachandran begins with is the Phantom Limb Syndrome which is a tendency to feel the presence of a missing limb although it is gone and no longer functions. He carried this out with a person named Derek Stein who lost his arm in a motor accident 13 years prior. For Derek's case, Dr. Ramachandran says that the body is also constructed in the mind of a person, thereby, forming the body image. He explains that amputated patients like Derek due to their body image imagine the presence of their limbs and feel the senses accordingly. For him, once Derek understood his Phantom pain, he will be able to understand his pain. Therefore, he explained to Derek that the brain has the whole body mapped and at times, the vacant areas of the body are given senses although they do not really work anymore because of the misinterpretation of the brain's signals after the amputation was performed.

The next case shown is of Graham Young who could see certain things although he was blind. Dr. Ramachandran tries to determine why the consciousness attends to the detection of certain things and not aware of the others. He explains that the eyeball and the brain have two separate pathways or regions which make a human see different things through the visual cortex. While one pathway is aware or conscious, the other is unconscious of the things surrounding it.The former is common in humans, whereas the latter is mainly seen in rodents and other animals which is also responsible for reflexive actions. Graham's eyesight, termed blindsight, is, thus, similar to reptiles'.

Peggy, another patient, on the other hand, has similar ignorance of sight while she is drawing daisies right after she has had a stroke. She does not realise that she is drwaing her daisies in the wrong way with the left part missing unless it is pointed out to her. For this, Dr. Ramachandran explains that there are around 30 areas in the brain responsible for only seeing things around. He concludes that the problem is not only of the senses but also a problem of the consciousness.

The next case mentioned is of David which has been one of the rarest and strangest cases that Dr. Ramachandran has ever encountered. Due to a car accident, David had gone into a coma and after recovering from his injuries, he had all his senses intact and showed no sign of psychotic behaviour or emotional disturbance except one. This exception was of recognizing his own parents as imposters. David's condition was termed Cap Gras Illusion. However, along with his own parents, he thought of himself as an imposters sometimes. Ramachandran attempts to provide an explanation for this through Sigmund Freud's theory of Oedipus Complex. Due to the injury of the head, he says, the suppressed urges surface and David gets attracted to his mother. However, he rejects this theory in David's condition and attempts to look further into what the matter of the fact is. Therefore, he concludes that reacting to a certain picture of a figure, certain emptions have to be evoked. All this is connected to the visual system and the amygdala of the limbic system which produces emotional reactions but in David's case, such a connection has been cut due to his accident and, therefore, has resulted in his condition. Hence, when he sees his mother, he feels no warmth or emotion for her and judges her to be an imposter who looks just like his mother but is not really her. Moreover, when he talks to his father over the phone, he is convinced that it is his father. For this, too, Ramachandran explains that there is a separate pathway of the auditory cortex to the lymbic system which the accident did not damage in David. David's case has seemed to be more interesting and fascinating. It focuses on how certain delusions can have explanations in terms of one's neurological system.

All the cases reflect that there is a connection between one's psyche and one's neurological systems. Dr. Ramachandran, with his ground-breaking theories, has successfully attempted to explain just the same and answered many of the questions which was not understandable and hence, unanswered.