Serious Pain Relief thru Vision

        A story from Paul and Pat Churchland

 

The psychologist and neuroscientist V.S. Ramachandran turned up at U.C.S.D. as a junior faculty member around the

same time Pat and Paul arrived. Paul met him first, when Ramachandran went to one of his talks because he was

amused by the arrogance of its title- "How the Brain Works." Then Pat started observing the work in Ramachandran's lab.

She saw him perform a feat that seemed to her nearly as astonishing as curing the blind:

 

seating at a table, a patient suffering from pain in a rigid phantom arm, he held up a mirror in such a way that the

paitent's working arm appeared in the position of the missing one, and then instructed him to move it. As if by magic,

the patient felt the movement in his phantom limb, and his discomfort ceased. Pat spent more and more time at

Ramachandran's lab, and later on she collaborated with him on a paper title "A Critique of Pure Vision," which argued

that the function of vision was not to represent the world but to help a creature survive, and that it had evolved,

accordingly, as a partial and fractured system that served the more basic needs of the motor system. 

 

From a profile in "The New Yorker", 'Two Heads' by L.MacFarquhar

Remembering who you are. . .

 

 

When I have forgiven myself

and remembered who I am,

I will bless everyone and

everything I see.

A truth about Perception

Perception can make whatever picture

the mind desires to see.

Remember this.

In this lies either Heaven or hell,

as you elect.