The Tell-Tale Brain: A Neuroscientist's Quest for What Makes Us Human

     Second, doesn’t postulating a metarepresentation make us fall into the homunculus trap? (See Chapter 2, where the homunculus fallacy was discussed.) Doesn’t it imply a little man in the brain watching the metarepresentation and creating a meta-metarepresentation in his brain? The answer is no. A metarepresentation is not a picture-like replica of sensory representation; it results from further processing of early sensory representations and packaging them into more manageable chunks for linking to language and symbol juggling.

     The telephone syndrome, which Jason had, has been studied by Axel Klee and Orrin Devinsky.

2. I recall a lecture given at the Salk Institute by Francis Crick, who with James Watson codiscovered the structure of DNA and deciphered the genetic code, thereby unraveling the physical basis of life. Crick’s lecture was on consciousness, but before he could begin, a philosopher in the audience (from Oxford, I believe) raised his hand and protested, “But Professor Crick, you say you are going to talk about the neural mechanisms of consciousness, but you haven’t even bothered to define the word properly.” Crick’s response: “My dear chap, there was never a time in the history of biology when a group of us sat around the table saying let’s define life first. We just went out there and found out what it was—a double helix. We leave matters of semantic distinctions and definitions to you philosophers.”

3. Almost everyone knows of Freud as the father of psychoanalysis, but few realize that he began his career as a neurologist. Even as a student he published a paper on the nervous system of a primitive fishlike creature called a lamprey, convinced that the surest way to understand the mind was to approach it through neuroanatomy. But he soon became bored with lampreys and began to feel that his attempts to bridge neurology and psychiatry were premature. So he switched to “pure” psychology, inventing all the ideas we now associate with his name: id, ego, superego, Oedipus complex, penis envy, thanatos, and the like.

     In 1896 he became disillusioned once again and wrote his now famous “Manifesto for a Scientific Psychology” urging a neuroscientific approach to the human mind. Unfortunately he was way ahead of his time.

4. Although we intuitively understand what Freud meant, one could argue that the phrase “unconscious self” is an oxymoron since self-awareness (as we shall see) is one of the defining characteristics of the self. Perhaps the phrase “unconscious mind(s)” would be better, but the exact terminology isn’t important at this stage. (See also Note 2 for this chapter.)

5. Since Freud’s era there have been three major approaches to mental illness. First, there is “psychological,” or talk therapy, which would include psychodynamic (Freudian) as well as more recent “cognitive” accounts. Second, there are the anatomical approaches, which simply point out correlations between certain mental disorders and physical abnormalities in specific structures. For example, there is a presumed link between the caudate nucleus and obsessive-compulsive disorder, or between right frontal lobe hypometabolism and schizophrenia. Third there are neuropharmacological interpretations: think Prozac, Ritalin, Xanax. Of these three, the last approach has paid rich dividends (at least to the pharmaceutical industry) in terms of treating psychiatric disease; for better or worse, it has revolutionized the field.

     What is missing, though, and what I have attempted to broach in this book, is what might be called “functional anatomy”—to explain the cluster of symptoms that are unique to a given disorder in terms of functions that are equally unique to certain specialized circuits in the brain. (Here one must distinguish between a vague correlation and an actual explanation.) Given the inherent complexity of the human brain, it is unlikely that there will be a single climactic solution like DNA (although I don’t rule it out). But there may well be many instances where such a synthesis is possible on a smaller scale, leading to testable predictions and novel therapies. These examples may even pave the way for a grand unified theory of the mind—of the kind physicists have been dreaming about for the material universe.