That Neuroscience Guy - Neuroscience Bites-Book Recommendations

Episode Date: February 16, 2023

For this week's Neuroscience Bite, we discuss some good book recommendations if you want to learn about interesting neuroscience topics. 

Hi, my name is Olof Kregolsen and I'm a neuroscientist at the University of Victoria. And in my spare time, I'm that neuroscience guy. Welcome to another neuroscience bite. All right, for this bite, I'm going to do something a little bit different. A lot of people have DM me on Twitter and sort of said, hey, do you got any reading material? Like, what would you recommend? I really love neuroscience. I want to learn more about the brain. So I thought, Hey, I'm going to give some tips on what I read and what I would recommend. Cause there's stuff out there that I would recommend for sure. And there's stuff out there that I wouldn't recommend. So on today's bite, a reading tip or two. Probably the book that I recommend first and foremost,

because I find it fascinating. It was really well written, and it's true to what it's talking about, is a book by a guy by the name of V.S. Ramachandran. He's a distinguished professor at the Department of Psychology at the University of California, San Diego. He directs their Center for Brain and Cognition. And he published a book called Phantoms in the Brain back in 1998. And Phantoms in the Brain, it's well-written and it's fascinating. Every chapter sort of takes you through sort of a different issue. So in the first

chapter, Dr. Ramachandran talks different issue. So in the first chapter, Dr. Ramachandran talks about phantoms in the brain, which we did an episode on a while back, but he really works you through his theory of it. And what I like the most about it is he frames it with clinical cases. So he has actual patients that have deficits for all of the things he talks about. You can Google phantoms in the brain. You can see the chapters, but there's a lot in there. And the patient stuff is fascinating. My only caveat when I recommend phantoms in the brain as a book is when authors present clinical cases, you have to bear in mind two things. One, they do take a little liberty sometimes with the symptoms. They focus on the story they want to tell. They typically find a clinical case which is about as extreme as it gets. A good example is visual neglect. A lot of people after a stroke have

mild neglect, but in phantoms in the brain, the cases you'll encounter have extreme forms of neglect like anosognosia, which is a real clinical phenomenon, but it's pretty extreme and it's very, very rare. So bear that in mind. The other thing I'll tell you is that his TED talks are great. And he also had a television series through the BBC. That's getting harder to find, but if you go on YouTube and you either put in phantoms in the brain or you put in Ramachandran, I'll put a link to it on the show notes on my blog. But it's really cool because in the videos, of course, you meet these people. So you actually get to see someone with anosognosia and you can see them trying to reach into a mirror. You can meet someone who has experienced a phantom limb

and we'll tell you all about it. You can meet someone who has the Capcross syndrome. And probably one of the more interesting ones is a gentleman who has left temporal lobe epilepsy, which we haven't really talked about a lot, but it goes back to a quest to find what's called the God spot in the brain, which turns out isn't quite what people had originally thought it would be. So the book tip is Phantoms in the Brain. It's on Amazon. I just checked. It's definitely older, but all those clinical conditions haven't changed. Some of the theories have changed a bit, but they're there. Fascinating intro. And the other one, his 2010 book, The Telltale Brain, is also really good. So I'd recommend that as well. I won't do this every week on The Bite, but I literally had 10 DMs in the last 20 days saying, hey, book recommendations, book recommendations. So there you are, V.S. Ramachandran, Phantoms in

the Brain. You can watch some of it on YouTube. You can read the book. It's a heck of a read. I'll wrap it up there really quickly. Of course, check out the website. We've got Patreon. We got Etsy. This bite literally came from people following me on Twitter, at That Neurosci Guy.

DM me. Tell me what you want to know and how we can help here. And of course, thank you so much for listening to the podcast. My name is Olof Kregolsen, and I'm That Neuroscience Guy. I'll see you on Sunday for another full the podcast. My name is Olof Kregolsen, and I'm that neuroscience guy. I'll see you on Sunday for another full episode of That Neuroscience Guy.

See you soon.