Perception Seeing and Knowing \"Beauty

Perception

Seeing and Knowing

"Beauty is truth, truth beauty. That is all ye know on earth and all ye need to know," wrote the poet John Keats in a statement that -- because it encompasses the intuitiveness and ineffability of how it is that we perceive and recognize beauty. But while his statement was a perfect summation of the Romantic understanding of the relationship between the human mind, the human soul, and beauty, we have come rather a long distance since then in terms of understanding what it is that happens when we first perceive and then recognize a sensation from the world around us as being whatever we claim it to be within our personal and cultural meaning systems.

Neurologist V.S. Ramachandran studies the neural mechanisms that underlie all human behaviors. His most famous work is probably that which he has done on the phenomenon known as phantom limb pain, in which an individual feels -- indeed, is sometimes tortured -- by pain that he or she feels as emanating from an amputated limb. The phenomenon has been recognized for centuries, often occurring in soldiers who lost limbs in particularly traumatic ways. Ramachandran realized that this sensation of pain must originate in the brain for two very simple reasons: The central nervous system is ultimately involved in any processing of pain and since the limb was missing it could not in any way be the locus of the pain.

But this was not the key connection that Ramachandran made. That was his understanding that the brain could be remapped, that connections could be rewired even into adulthood. The brain could -- on the level of hardwiring -- could "learn" at a far later date in an individual's biography than had ever been suspected. Once this fact was known, Ramachandran was able to conceive of a new way in which to reprogram the brain vis-a-vis this particular phenomenon.

After realizing that phantom limb pain originated in the brain -- and that the brain could be remapped -- Ramachandran realized he needed to trick patients' brains into unlearning the pain associated with their phantom limbs.

"We call this phenomenon learned pain or learned paralysis," he says. "The question is: Can you unlearn the pain or paralysis by allowing the brain to send a command to the phantom and have the phantom move -- or appear to move -- in response to the command. But how do you do that? The guy doesn't have an arm. How do you make the arm appear to move?" (V.S. Ramachandran's Tales of the 'Tell-Tale Brain')

Ramachandran found that he could help his subjects learn to trick their own brains by using a box with a mirror that allowed amputees to "see" their missing limbs move (while what they were actually seeing of course was the inverted reflection of the remaining limb).

This "seeing" of something that was not there, and that was of course absolutely known to be missing to the subject, helped the brain reconcile itself to the body's new shape and thus remove the need for the pain centers of the brain to continue to send phantom waves of pain. In just a few minutes, Ramachandran's subjects could overcome pain that had in many cases haunted them for years and even decades.

Ramachandran based this breakthrough on an established understanding that "that there's a complete map of the body's surface on the surface of the brain." However, the way in which the body is mapped on the surface area of the brain is not as straightforward as scientists had once expected, as Ramachandran explains:

So every point on the body's surface has a corresponding point in the brain. Now the curious thing about this map is, even though it's continuous, the face area of the map is right next to the hand area instead of being near the neck where it should be. (V.S. Ramachandran's Tales of the 'Tell-Tale Brain')