The Tell-Tale Brain
Explores why the human brain is so unique and how it became so enchantingly complex. This title reveals what baffling and extreme case studies can teach us about the brain and how it evolved.
Stats for nerds
6recommend
6mentions
6people
2012–2022years
100% recommend
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- The rubber arm thing is interesting. It's much like the mirror boxes used to stimulate phantom limbs, and by doing this patients can relax phantom limbs that are permanently 'tensed'. This was created by a doctor VS Ramachandran. He wrote a few books, they're somewhat pop Sci but include a fair bit of in depth knowledge. His book Phantoms in the Brain covers a lot of this. Another book of his, The Tell Tale Brain, is a bit more general but it's also a fascinating looking at how the physical brain and consciousness intersect, especially in regards to disease
- I really enjoy books on neuroscience that change the way I think about perception.
Phantoms in the Brain by V S Ramachandran - a book about how the brain organises itself in bizarre edge cases. The Tell-Tale Brain: A Neuroscientist's Quest for What Makes us Human. The Tell-Tale Brain: A Neuroscientist's Quest for What Makes us Human by the same author is also worth reading.
Admissions by Henry Marsh - An experienced neurosurgeon's account of how his job has changed over the decades. Really interesting discussion of what's important and how people react in a real crisis.
The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat by Oliver Sacks. More of a collection of interesting curiousities but does an amazing job of humanising the discussion of brain.
- All the books below have shaped my thought process to a significant degree. I started reading late but I'm fortunate enough to have stumbled upon these gems.
"Debt: The First 5000 Years": This is truly a magnum opus. Until I read this I had taken money, economy, market etc., for granted. And I had held onto the widely accepted, but naive, view that economic systems somehow grew out of barter systems. The range of topics discussed, and the way author shows how seemingly independent concepts are intertwined, is truly astonishing. I'm on my 2nd read.
"Thinking, Fast and Slow": This book made me truly appreciate the value of psychology. I didn't even know the existence of a vast domain called behavioral science until I read this book. Now I'm deliberately conscious about the decisions I take and retrace my thought process multiple times just to make sure that I haven't fallen pray to some of the cognitive biases.
"The Tell-Tale Brain": While I did know that human brain is a unique organ this book opened my eyes to its layered complexities. For instance, how "seeing" is not a single step but a multi step process. From image formation, to identifying the object, to evoking emotional response.
"QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter": The book with the highest signal to noise ratio. I finally understood what science is about, a way to model nature and to keep refining it to fit the observation. There are no true/false theories/models only those that explain nature's behavior better or worse. Nature is agnostic to all our theories and models. She's just the way she is. For details read about double slit experiment.
"How the World Works": This one along with "Profit Over People: Neoliberalism & Global Order" has greatly shaped my mental model about the workings of contemporary world. I now understand why does military gets all the funding, why do powerful governments tend to keep its subject under perpetual fear, why is it that the cost of education has been sky-rocketing.
"The Hanging of Afzal Guru and the Strange Case of the Attack on the Indian Parliament": A glimpse into the working of Indian justice system.
"Broken Republic": This is by far the most accurate description about current affairs in India. How India is being hollowed out and how its most vulnerable section is the one fighting against it.
"Grammatical Man: Information, Entropy, Language and Life": I'm currently reading it (20% through) and it has already made a big impact. The meaning of information is deep and subtle and pervades not just human being but the life itself.
"The Order of Time": The book that well and truly shook the foundation that I had taken for granted for my entire life. That space and time aren't something absolute and are personal has had a profound impact on me.
"The Upanisads": A truly remarkable work of human mind. Just to think about some of the concepts uplifts my mood.
- > Things need to change!!!
How should things change? I genuinely feel for you so keep the rest of what I'm going to say at arms distance.
The way I see it, you are essentially asking people not to learn from each other. Software is not basic science where, if you discover a process or a particle, you are putting into words something outside the human brain.
Software (mathematical formulations aside) describes how the brain works. Anyone can hear a high level description of your SpeakerBlast an imagine a way to sync speakers. Their implementation might be radically different to yours but there is no way for you to stop me from imagining a solution based simply on your two sentence description of the product.
If you want to learn more about this process, there's a book by a neuroscientist, The Tell-Tale Brain by VS Ramachandran, which delves into the process of mirroring and meme spreading.
- Ramachandrans The Tell-Tale Brain is certainly one of my favorite books, anyone who is interested in neurobiology should read it.
- The Tell-Tale Brain - V S Ramachandran. This has been one awesome book.
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