The Strange Workings of
the Brain
Outline

Phobias

Phantom Limbs

Prosopagnosia and the Capgras Delusion

Synesthesia

Memory

Consciousness
Phobias
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ta-FGE7QELQ
Phantom Limbs
• Sensation that missing limb is still present
• Often painful
• Can sometimes be controlled, sometimes act on
their own accord
• Not necessarily the same as missing limb
– Missing arm felt “6 inches too short”
• Related to mapping of body onto brain
• Mirror treatment
Cortical Homonculus
Phantom Limbs
• Sensation that missing limb is still present
• Often painful
• Can sometimes be controlled, sometimes act on
their own accord
• Not necessarily the same as missing limb
– Missing arm felt “6 inches too short”
• Related to mapping of body onto brain
• Mirror treatment provides visual feedback
Mirror Box Treatment
Prosopagnosia and the Capgras
Delusion
• Prosopagnosia: inability to recognize faces
– Can follow from traumatic brain injury
• Usually associated with damage to fusiform gyrus (part of
temporal lobe)
– Different forms:
• Apperceptive: severe, can’t even tell gender of person,
‘faces make no sense’
• Associative: can’t make links between face and person
– Subject may have emotional response without
conscious recognition
Prosopagnosia and the Capgras
Delusion
• Capgras Delusion: person holds a delusion that
a friend, spouse, parent, etc. has been replaced
by an identical-looking impostor
• Thought to be like reverse of Prosopagnosia
– Conscious ability to recognize faces, but without
automatic emotional response
• Can be caused by traumatic brain injury
– Possibly due to disconnection between temporal
cortex (facial recognition) and limbic system
(emotions)


Neurological condition in which stimulation in
one cognitive pathway causes stimulation in
another
Examples:

Symbol --> color or spatial location

Sound --> color

Symbol --> personality


“T’s are generally crabbed, ungenerous
creatures. U is a soulless sort of thing. 4 is
honest, but… 3 I cannot trust… 9 is dark, a
gentleman, tall and graceful, but politic under
his suavity”
Can test for synesthia


1 in 23 people have mild synesthesia
Likely due to cross activation of different brain
regions
Testing for Synesthesia


“T’s are generally crabbed, ungenerous
creatures. U is a soulless sort of thing. 4 is
honest, but… 3 I cannot trust… 9 is dark, a
gentleman, tall and graceful, but politic under
his suavity”
Can test for synesthia


1 in 23 people have mild synesthesia
Likely due to cross activation of different brain
regions

Synesthesia can be beneficial to those effected



Synesthetes are truly gods among men


Can aid memory – we’ll see this in a bit
Many artists have synesthesia
Famous Synesthetes include: John Mayer, Pharell
and Eddie Van Halen!!!
Some think that synesthesia can be related to
the development of language

Kiki or Booba?
Memory
• Impressive capacities for memory:
– Solomon Shereshevsky
• Russian dude active in the early 20th c.
• Could reproduce incredibly long lists of sounds, words,
formulas, etc. without error after indefinite amounts of time
• Diagnosed with 5-fold synesthesia
– Music  color, touch  taste, etc.
• Would memorize things by placing them in imaginary
landscape
– Might forget something if he couldn’t find it in this landscape
Memory
• Impressive capacities for memory:
– Shass Pollak: Jewish mnemonists who memorized
more than 5,000 pages of 12 books of Babylonian
Talmud
– A pin would be placed on a word, let us say, the
fourth word in line eight; the memory sharp would
then be asked what word is in the same spot on
page thirty-eight or fifty or any other page; the pin
would be pressed through the volume until it
reached page thirty eight or page fifty or any other
page designated; the memory sharp would then
mention the word and it was found invariably correct.
Memory Disorders
•
Henry Gustav Molaison (H.M.)
– Anterograde amnesia: can’t form new memories
– Bad epilepsy  brain surgery, removed parts of medial temporal lobes
– Lost ability to form new long term memories
– Could still learn new motor memories, but wouldn’t remember having learned them
•
K.C.
– Intact semantic memory, no episodic memory
– “unable to describe an event that took place in school that specifically included him;
however, he knows that he went to school, and he retains the knowledge that he gained
there“
•
Clive Wearing
– Memento syndrome as result of Herpes simplex
– ‘Waking up’ every 20 seconds
– 8:31 AM: Now I am really, completely awake.
9:06 AM: Now I am perfectly, overwhelmingly awake.
9:34 AM: Now I am superlatively, actually awake.
Consciousness
• Physical theory for consciousness
– Some argue that consciousness must be a quantum
phenomenon
• Orchestrated Object Reduction (Orch-OR)
– Formulated by Roger Penrose and an
anesthesiologist
– Godel’s theorem  brain can go beyond
axioms/algorithms
• Theorem relates to un-provable-ness of theorms
Consciousness
• More Penrose
– For non-algorithmic physics, look to quantum theory
– Collapse of wave function is probabilistic
– “states are proposed to be selected by a 'noncomputable' influence embedded in the fundamental
level of spacetime geometry at the Planck scale.”
– Plato: pure values and forms exist in abstract realm
– Penrose: this realm is the Planck scale
– Suggests that brain contains these isolated quantum
systems – possibly in microtubules inside neurons
THE END