Ramachandran
Article
Ramachandran is a recurring person in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between November 11, 2022 and July 16, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as “Speaking of Ramachandran, he also did a lot of research on phantom limb pain”; “laws of qualia by Ramachandran and Hirstein 7”. It most often appears alongside Scott, Wikipedia, Aella.
Metadata
- Category: People
- Mention count: 2
- Issue count: 2
- First seen: November 11, 2022
- Last seen: July 16, 2024
Appears In
Related Pages
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- Scott (2 shared issues)
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- Wikipedia (2 shared issues)
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- Aella (1 shared issues)
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- astral projection (1 shared issues)
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- auditory cortex (1 shared issues)
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- Bayes (1 shared issues)
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- Big Bang (1 shared issues)
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- Buddhists (1 shared issues)
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- cerebellum (1 shared issues)
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- Chesterton’s Fence (1 shared issues)
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- Christof Koch (1 shared issues)
External Links
Source Context
Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.
In college I had the great honor of hearing a lecture by legendary neuroscientist V. S. Ramachandran, who helped put synaethesia on the neuroscientific map. Synaesthesia is where people have an association between unlike sensory or conceptual domains - most often color and something else. For example, each number might be a different color. Many people have this to a weak degree (Aella has an interesting survey here) but some people apparently have it to such a strong degree that it almost-literally jumps out of the page. Ramachandran demonstrated this in an experiment by showing that these people could identify 2s among a sea of 5s faster than everyone else: In his paper on the phenomenon, Ramachandran wrote that he got pushback from other scientists for studying this, since they thought synaesthetes: “…are just crazy. The phenomenon is simply the result of a hyperactive imagination. Or maybe they are trying to draw attention to themselves by claiming to be special or different in some way.” You can read the paper here. This has left me nervous about explanations where people only say they have a weird mental ability to “draw attention” or “claim to be different”.
Inline links: has an interesting survey here, here
Subjects were shown the image on the left, where it’s hard and time-consuming to find the 2s among the 5s. Extremely synaesthesic subjects, who strongly associate numbers with colors, perceived something more like the image on the right, and so were able to find the 2s faster than everyone else. Source: Wikipedia Speaking of Ramachandran, he also did a lot of research on phantom limb pain, ie someone who has had their right arm amputated, but still feels pain in their right arm, or at least the empty space where their right arm should be. This is at least as weird as any of these other examples, but as far as I know everyone acknowledges it exists. I think this is just because most people first heard it from fancy scientists who assured everybody that their patients said it existed. But I would like to believe things even before fancy scientists verify them.
Inline links: Wikipedia
Speaking of Ramachandran, he also did a lot of research on phantom limb pain, ie someone who has had their right arm amputated, but still feels pain in their right arm, or at least the empty space where their right arm should be. This is at least as weird as any of these other examples, but as far as I know everyone acknowledges it exists. I think this is just because most people first heard it from fancy scientists who assured everybody that their patients said it existed. But I would like to believe things even before fancy scientists verify them.
Perspectivity: qualia are experienced “from” somewhere. Three more are given as “laws of qualia” by Ramachandran and Hirstein7. I’d summarize them as follows: Irrevocability: qualia can’t be directly overridden by top-down attention.
Inline links: 7
Ramachandran, V.S., Hirstein, W.: Three laws of qualia: what neurology tells us about the biological functions of consciousness