V.S. Ramachandran is a leading neuroscientist, sometimes called the neuroscientist’s neuroscientist , the Marco Polo of neuroscience… You likely know his colleagues as bamboozling brain boffins who spend their days creating neuroporn – those fascinating images of your brain that seemingly justify spending all that money on neuroimaging toys.
Ramachandran you will know by his simple, curious. and very human, approach. His work with a cardboard box and three dollar mirror unlocked the mystery of phantom limbs and if you missed that story you can find it dramatised for effect in it an episode of “House”.
This is quote from his book The Tell-Tale Brain: A neuroscientist’s quest for what makes us human.
“Indeed, the line between perceiving and hallucinating is not as crisp as we like to think.
In a sense, when we look at the world, we are hallucinating all the time.
One could almost regard perception as the act of choosing the one hallucination that best fits the incoming data.”
V.S. Ramachandran
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VS Ramachandran, in this link between perception and hallucination, has given us a new way to look at psychoses. This is mind-blowing but it feels good.
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Hi Justin
Welcome. I’m glad to help you blow your mind in a good way.
Ramachandran rocks.
In my experience opening us up to new ways of looking, seeing, understanding is what psychosis is for – a process we might go through so that we can break through to new way of looking at our situation-some order within us that’s disintegrating so that some thing new can take its place and grow.
Sometimes that can be a very discomforting experience but life is sometimes very uncomfortable.
We understand how giving birth can involve great pain – perhaps we can come to see see psychosis as a form of re-birthing.
Kevin
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