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

Another consequence of damage to the anterior cingulate is the alien-hand syndrome, in which the person’s hand does something he doesn’t “will” it to do. I saw a woman with this disorder in Oxford (together with Peter Halligan). The patient’s left hand would reach out and grab objects without her intending to, and she had to use her right hand to pry loose her fingers to let go of the object. (Some of the male graduate students in my lab have dubbed this the “third-date syndrome.”) Alien-hand syndrome underscores the important role of the anterior cingulate in free will, transforming a philosophical problem into a neurological one.

Philosophy has set up a way of looking at the consciousness problem by considering abstract questions such as qualia and their relationship to the self. Psychoanalysis, while able to frame the problem in terms of conscious and unconscious brain processes, hasn’t formulated clearly testable theories nor do they have the tools to test them. My goal in this chapter has been to demonstrate that neuroscience and neurology provide us with a new and unique opportunity to understand the structure and function of the self, not only from the outside by observing behavior, but also from studying the inner workings of the brain.¹⁷ By studying patients such as those in this chapter, who have deficits and disturbances in the unity of self, we can gain deeper insight into what it means to be human.¹⁸

If we succeed in this, it will be the first time in evolution that a species has looked back on itself and not only understood its own origins but also figured out what or who is the conscious agent doing the understanding. We don’t know what the ultimate outcome of such a journey will be, but surely it is the greatest adventure humankind has ever embarked on.

EPILOGUE

…gives to airy nothing a local habitation and a name…

—WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

ONE OF THE MAJOR THEMES IN THE BOOK—WHETHER TALKING about body image, mirror neurons, language evolution, or autism—has been the question of how your inner self interacts with the world (including the social world) while at the same time maintaining its privacy. The curious reciprocity between self and others is especially well developed in humans and probably exists only in rudimentary form in the great apes. I have suggested that many types of mental illness may result from derangements in this equilibrium. Understanding such disorders may pave the way not only for solving the abstract (or should I say philosophical) problem of the self at a theoretical level, but also for treating mental illness.

My goal has been to come up with a new framework to explain the self and its maladies. The ideas and observations I have presented will hopefully inspire new experiments and set the stage for a more coherent theory in the future. Like it or not, this is the way science often works in its early stage: Discover the lay of the land first before attempting all-encompassing theories. Ironically it’s also the stage when science is most fun; every little experiment you do, you feel like Darwin unearthing a new fossil or Richard Burton turning another bend of the Nile to discover its source. You may not share their lofty stature, but in trying to emulate their style you feel their presence as guardian angels.

To use an analogy from another discipline, we are now at the same stage that chemistry was in the nineteenth century: discovering the basic elements, grouping them into categories, and studying their interactions. We are still grouping our way toward the equivalent of the periodic table but are not anywhere near atomic theory. Chemistry had many false leads—such as the postulation of a mysterious substance, phlogiston, which seemed to explain some chemical interactions until it was discovered that to do so phlogiston had to have a negative weight! Chemists also came up with spurious correlations. For example, John Newlands’s law of octaves, which claimed that elements came in clusters of eight like the eight notes in one octave of the familiar do-re-mi-fa-so-la-ti-do scale of Western music. (Though wrong, this idea paved the way for the periodic table.) One hopes the self isn’t like phlogiston!