“Ramachandran is a latter-day Marco Polo, journeying the silk road of science to strange and exotic Cathays of the mind,” Richard Dawkins once wrote. But it is the awe that he inspires in his scientific colleagues that best illuminates his position in neuroscience, where the originality of his thinking and the simple elegance of his experiments give him a unique status. His 1998 book, “Phantoms in the Brain,” about rare neurological disorders, was adapted as a miniseries on BBC television, and the Indian government recently accorded him the title Padma Bhushan, the country’s third-highest civilian honor. Ramachandran, who is fifty-seven, has held prestigious fellowships at All Souls College, in Oxford, and at the Royal Institution, in London. Ramachandran favors a low-tech experimental method, which “forces you to be ingenious.” Photograph by Dan Winters Ramachandran, an Indian-born behavioral neurologist who is the director of the Center for Brain and Cognition at U.C.S.D., and has a reputation among his peers for being able to solve some of the most mystifying riddles of neuroscience. To that end, he had scheduled a meeting with Dr. He had come to La Jolla not to be cured of his desire (like most people with the syndrome, he believed that relief would come only with the removal of the limb) but to gain insight into its cause. He also suffers from a rare and bewildering condition called apotemnophilia, the compulsion to have a perfectly healthy limb amputated-in his case, the right leg, at mid-thigh. He is a physician and an amateur cellist, and has been married for forty-seven years. Jamieson is seventy years old and lives in the Midwest.
One morning in January, a tall, gray-haired man whom I will call Arthur Jamieson arrived at the Mandler Hall psychology building, at the University of California, San Diego, in La Jolla.
0 kommentar(er)
