Abstract
How does the brain see? This important question turned out to be the theme of a curious cocktail party conversation between V. S. Ramachandran, eminent neurologist, and a young individual uninitiated into the subtleties of brain science. The young chap asked Ramachandran what he did for a living. The neurologist explained that his research interests lay in the study of vision, of how the brain perceives objects. The man seemed to be unimpressed. What is there to be studied in something as simple and spontaneous as seeing? Ramachandran asked how, according to this gentleman, brain saw?
When one of these flashbacks was reported to me by a conscious patient, I was incredulous. For example, when a mother told me she was suddenly aware, as my electrode touched the cortex, of being in the kitchen listening to the voice of her little boy who was playing outside in the yard.
—Wilder Penfield.
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Chakravarthy, V.S. (2019). Maps, Maps Everywhere. In: Demystifying the Brain. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-3320-0_6
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