Solving the puzzle called human mind
So, this week, driven to it by lack of other reading material, and because I was rather curious, I picked up the intriguingly titled book The Tell-Tale Brain. Subtitled Unlocking The Mystery Of Human Nature, it’s not the kind of book I’d usually choose as bedtime reading, but my bookshelf was rather lean of fiction that week or anything historical, which would be my second choice, so neurology it was.
Side note: I’m a huge fan of Grey’s Anatomy, that soapy medical drama, and one of my favourite characters is Dr Derek Shepperd, also known as Dr McDreamy, who happens to be a neurologist. And if you’ve watched as many medical shows as I have, you kind of know your way around the medical terms as well.
Anyway, I began to read this book, at first propping myself up in my ‘serious reading position’, pillow resting on the headboard, hair in ponytail, adjusting imaginary reading glasses, until I really started to get into it. The author V.S. Ramachandran, not only knew his way around a brain, he knew how to engage with his reader as well. The reader being someone who would never ever read a book about a brain in her life, so I thought that was pretty fine writing. Consider this sentence, which I thought was so full of sweet gentle humour, while talking about the female ape presenting her rear during mating time, “This feature has been lost in human females, who have evolved to be continuously receptive sexually throughout the month-something I have yet to observe personally.” This thrown into an otherwise academic discourse on sexual evolution made me reread twice, wondering if he had just thrown that in to see if I was paying attention.
So, after that, I couldn’t not Google him. Here’s what I found out: Richard Dawkins called him the “Marco Polo of neuroscience”, Newsweek named him one of the hundred people to watch of the 21st century, he won a Padma Bhushan in 2007, and he even has a dinosaur named after him, if Wikipedia is to be believed.
Nevertheless, this is not a quick read. I’m still in the middle of it, I have to make frequent pauses to puzzle through a sentence in my head, but I’m enjoying myself thoroughly. It’s nice every now and then to step out of your comfort zone and read something so totally different to what you normally would, and with its easy prose and light sentences, this book is a good place to start.
The writer is an author
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