Phantoms In The Brain Summary

The book Phantoms in the brain by; neuroscientist V.S. Ramachandran and New York Times science writer Sandra Blakeslee, consists in the explanation of neurophysiology and neuropsychology, the authors also showed some cases of patients with peculiar mental disorders, that some doctors could not diagnose, therefore the patients were declared insane. The reason for this is that not all doctors will take the time to look into different meanings for illnesses; it includes many mysteries of the human mind and the reason why these occur. Ramachandran talks about plasticity in the brain and borderline neurological cases. The author analyzes the cases profoundly regardless how bizarre, empirical, strikingly simple the case can be. The neuroscientist,

It is about these two people a man and a woman who literally died laughing. The man suddenly started to burst out uncontrollable laughing at a funeral then died around 24 hours later in the hospital. And the girl was a librarian who at work started laughing and couldn't stop. Believe it or not there is actually a reason behind how someone could "die laughing". Apparently these people had a sub-aThis chapter was about a woman who thought she was pregnant but when she went to the doctor it ended up to be a pseudocyesis or false pregnancy. Its when someone may want a baby so much that they actually are able to trick their body into thinking it's pregnant. They will have all the symptoms of being pregnant however they are just imagining it. In my opinion this was really cool because of how the mind could be that suggestive about something that it can make your body actually express symptoms like those of pregnancy arachnoid hemorrhage which ruptured an artery in their heads compressing part of the hypothalamus. In the final chapter of this book Ramachandran talks about vision again and how we interpret color. He mainly goes into the color red and how its again is just a figment of our imagination and the