Blinded Me With Neuroscience
Ramachandran Plumbs Depths of Love, Art, Phantom Limbs 
BY LINNEA BUTTERFIELD

Thursday evening, Vilayanur Ramachandran, pioneer in neuroscience and professor at the University of California, San Diego, presented a talk entitled “The Artful Brain: A Neurologist Looks at Human Nature and the Meaning of Art,” as the last speaker in the 2000-2001 convocation series. Ramachandran focused his new research on areas that other scientists put aside. In his work, he attempts to uncover the neuronal circuitry for what he calls the more interesting questions, such as love and art. He divided his lecture into three categories: the phenomena of “phantom limbs,” synesthesia and speculation on the brain’s experience with art.
“The visual system has been relatively intensively and extensively studied, and we know more about it from a neurobiological perspective than we do about much of the rest of the brain. So, in a way, it is not surprising that new ideas about the relationship of the visual brain and one of its creations, art, should be arising at this time,” Professor of Biology Mark Braford said.
Phantom limbs are the nerve impluses amputees experience from amputated limbs, as if those limbs were still attached.
Ramachandran used his recent research on phantom limbs to introduce the idea that the brain’s connection to the human body is linked through more complex systems than scientists have previously posited. Ramachandran studied a male subject with an amputated arm and discovered that stimulating the lower left half of the face (the cheek, jaw, chin and portion above the lip), stimulates the same sensory neurons in the brain that the subject’s missing arm did. 
For example, running a Q-tip across the subject’s jaw line made the subject feel as though a Q-tip had been brushed across his knuckles on the missing arm. This only worked when the subject’s eyes were closed because visual stimuli interferes with tactile messages sent to the somatosensory cortex when the face is touched. In essence, the “cortex is hungry for sensory input and invades the territory set for the hand,” Ramachandran said.
Dennison Smith, Professor of Neuroscience said, “Ramachandran’s work has broad implications. It gives us insight into how the brain works, how we view and come to know the world and why we, at times, misperceive reality. For example, some of his work on phantom limb and body image has direct implications for understanding why patients with anorexia nervosa misperceive their body image — so it has implications for that disorder.”
Ramachandran’s second topic, synesthesia, is common to many artists including Vladimir Nobokov and Wassili Kadinsky. A syndrome that connects numbers and colors, it has not been well understood by scientists in the past. Sometimes synesthesia can be difficult to study because brain associations can often be abstract. Ramachandran studied synesthesic subjects that connect Arabic numerals to colors. For example, two of his subjects identified the number two with green and the number five with red. Subjects were tested by similar looking numbers (inverted twos and fives) laid out as a triangle. Synesthesics were able to distinguish the triangle much more quickly than normal subjects. 
“Is it a coincidence that the most common type of synesthesia is number and color, and that the number and color areas are right next to each other in the brain?” Ramachandran asked. He admitted that studying the brain in this piecemeal fashion, where certain areas show specific function, presents drawbacks. He said his method is a way to begin studying the brain, explaining that the eventual goal is to integrate the parts to understand the whole.
The longest portion of Ramachandran’s talk focused on art. An avid collector of Indian art since 1996, he had an epiphany while walking around temples in his homeland. Ramachandran seeks the underlying universal principles of art defining seven so far. 
Ramachandran compared the history of Indian art to the Western evolution and analyzed both processes in three general stages. He broke down the chronology of art into realism, a semi-abstract stage and a completely abstract phase. For Western art, Picasso falls within the completely abstract phase. Ramachandran presented a possible neurological explanation for the rapture of Picasso’s work. He stated that Picasso hit upon an artistic idea that hyperactivates a synapse in the “master cell” of the visual cortex. The visual cortex is wired to see faces from certain angles — it is accustomed to do so. Yet, if Picasso paints a profile that shows both eyes on one side of the face and elongates the lips, the “master cell” is over-stimulated, causing aesthetic pleasure. 

“I thought it was interesting how you could take particular pieces of art and trace then back to particular neurons in the brain,” senior Jane Blaney said. 
In the question and answer portion of the talk, Art History Professor William Hood accused Ramachandran of over-generalizing the nature of art. Ramachandran refuted this and said, “I prefaced this section of my talk by saying there is 90 percent of art that we cannot reduce, but it is the 10 percent that I’m after. Is there a common denominator? Are there scientific principles? If you can demonstrate this. It’s like the Chomskian perception of linguistics. Of course languages are different all over the world, but there are cross-cultural commonalties.”
Daniel Kimmel, a senior, said, “Speaking to the last third of his lecture I think it’s great that he’s walking down these roads even if he’s walking in the wrong direction.”