The BS Column: The Man Who Would Map the Mind

(Published on November 15, 2009, in the Business Standard)

Only the steady tide of readers overflowing into the aisles of the Gulmohar Hall indicated that this was not just another book discussion at the India Habitat Centre in Delhi. Vilayanur Ramachandran’s lecture drew students, fellow neurologists and inquiring readers in such numbers that we could easily have filled the nearby Stein Auditorium.

The neurologist and author was here to deliver the inaugural Charles Darwin lecture, though his speech was not marked by the high excitement that attended a similar event in 1860 at a meeting of the British Association at Oxford. That debate, on Darwin’s recently published Origin of the Species, saw an epic clash between Bishop Wilberforce and T H Huxley. Sir Joseph Hooker wrote: “The battle waxed hot. Lady Brewster fainted, the excitement increased as others spoke.”

Wilberforce is said to have asked Huxley if he claimed his descent from a monkey through his grandfather or his grandmother—the actual words are in doubt. Huxley’s famous response was that he would not be ashamed to have a monkey for an ancestor; but he would be ashamed to be connected to any man who used his gifts to obscure the truth.

No ladies fainted during Professor Ramachandran’s speech in Delhi, or during his earlier presentation at the TED India conference, though there was much applause and laughter. The author of Phantoms in the Brain, The Emerging Mind and The Man with the Phantom Twin is as accomplished a speaker as he is a writer, with a simultaneous gift for humour and clarity. Ramachandran has loyal followers (and readers) around the world in part because he passes the Stephen Jay Gould test.

The late Stephen Jay Gould wrote, “I have fiercely maintained one personal rule in all my so-called "popular" writing. I believe-­as Galileo did when he wrote his two greatest works as dialogues in Italian rather than didactic treatises in Latin, as Thomas Henry Huxley did when he composed his masterful prose free from jargon, as Darwin did when he published all his books for general audiences­ that we can still have a genre of scientific books suitable for and accessible alike to professionals and interested lay people. The concepts of science, in all their richness and ambiguity, can be presented without any compromise, without any simplification counting as distortion, in language accessible to all intelligent people."

Ramachandran shares Gould’s passion for clarity, and his belief that even the more complex reaches of science are not beyond the grasp of the average intelligent lay person. He led us rapidly through his explorations of the philosophy behind the workings of the brain, but what was of particular interest was his discussion of mirror neurons.

In 2000, Edge carried a paper by Ramachandran that has proved to be one of the most influential works of its kind: ‘Mirror neurons and imitation learning as the driving force behind "the great leap forward" in human evolution.’ He dubs mirror neurons “Dalai Lama neurons”, or “empathy neurons”—these are cells that fire both when a person acts, or observes an action performed by someone else. Ramachandran’s research led him to a succinct and breathtaking hypothesis: “The mirror neurons, it would seem, dissolve the barrier between self and others.” Going a step further, he suggests that there might be rational and neurological, rather than religious, grounds for ethics.

From his 2000 and 2006 research, Ramachandran’s inquiring mind has already moved further. He ran out of time and couldn’t go on to discuss his next obsession: the possibility of “multiple minds” in a single brain, the idea that your sense of your self might be even more subjective than you realize. If we are “nothing but a pack of neurons”, and if the brain produces our individual versions of reality, why not explore this possibility further? Would you be willing to upload your “self” into cyberspace, would you be willing to be a brain in a (presumably well-maintained) vat, if that allowed you to “be a combination of Einstein, Mark Spitz, Bill Gates, Hugh Heffner, and Gandhi, while at the same time preserving your own deeply personal memories and identity”?

As Ramachandran shifted gears, citing the Upanishads and Advaita philosophies of the self and consciousness with as much ease as he referred to the latest research on autism, I was not alone in my sense of awe. Ramachandran and his colleagues have a long way to go before they can prove their hypotheses, but if they succeed, they will change the way we think about individuality, consciousness and the self forever.

The last time we had such a shift in human thought was in November 1859, when the publisher John Murray brought out the first 1,250 copies of On the Origin of Species and Natural Selection. I’m guessing that within the next two decades, those of us who were present in that small auditorium in Delhi will look back at Ramachandran’s talk on consciousness with a sense of having been present at the making of history. Few readers could ask for more from a literary evening.

The BS Column: Don't sue the science guys

(Published in the Business Standard, August 10, 2009. My apologies for not updating this blog more frequently; I'm trying to finish a project by August-end, and hope to be back to bloggishness in September.)


Simon Singh authored the first book about mathematics to become a number one bestseller in the UK, Fermat’s Last Theorem. His next two books, The Code Book and The Big Bang, are among the most lucid and precise examples of science writing you might read today. He’s a great entertainer, electrocuting gherkins on stage as an example of the “red shift” effect that helps prove the universe is expanding.

He’s also at the centre of a growing debate about science writing, libel laws and the rise of pseudoscience. About a year ago, Simon Singh wrote “Beware the spinal trap”, an article that examined the claims made by chiropractors. In the piece, Singh evaluated the risks involved in undergoing chiropractic treatment, and dismissed some claims—that chiropractors can treat children with asthma, colic and other ailments—as “utter nonsense” and “bogus”. This seemed to be a routine, if well-researched piece; Singh offered evidence of the links between bad chiropractic techniques and heart strokes, and seemed to back up his scepticism with facts.

The British Chiropractic Association sued Singh, claiming that he had defamed their reputation, and as of 4th August, the writer was fighting for the right of permission to appeal in what has become a key libel case. Libel suits are feared in the UK—they are expensive, with costs for the defence usually running well over POUNDS 100,000, and the burden of proof rests with the defence. Though much of the case concerns Singh’s use of the word “bogus”—to the delight of language scholars who’ve been blogging learned definitions and word origins—the broader issue is whether libel laws should apply to science writing.

The reason why Simon Singh is willing to go through the long, grim and financially draining process of a court case rather than issue a general apology is because he believes that science writers should be free to question dodgy science or pseudo-scientific claims. Libel suits are an easy way to prevent science writers from tackling certain subjects—as the pharmacological industry well knows. Over time, the threat of libel acts as a deterrent, preventing public inquiry into subjects that affect us at a very basic level. The pressure group Sense About Science has been running a very successful Keep Libel Laws Out of Science campaign, and is now in touch with PEN and other free-speech groups.

As an illustration of how important it is to promote freedom of speech in science writing, consider the case of Dr Ben Goldacre. His book, Bad Science, is on the Aventis Science Writing shortlist for 2009, and includes Goldacre’s debunking of vitamin pill magnate Matthias Rath’s dangerous claims in a campaign in Africa that anti-Aids drugs were poisonous, and that his vitamins were the true cure. Goldacre writes, “This chapter did not appear in the original edition of this book, because for fifteen months leading up to September 2008 the vitamin-pill entrepreneur Matthias Rath was suing me personally, and the Guardian, for libel. The Guardian generously paid for the lawyers, and in September 2008 Rath dropped his case, which had cost in excess of £500,000 to defend. Rath has paid £220,000 already, and the rest will hopefully follow. Nobody will ever repay me for the endless meetings, the time off work, or the days spent poring over tables filled with endlessly cross-referenced court documents.”

There’s a chilling lesson to be drawn here. Had Goldacre been more easily intimidated, or had the Guardian been less willing or able to fight such an expensive court case, the truth about Rath’s claims may never have come to public attention. Much of science writing today is pressed into the service of debunking pseudoscience—as with the patient and necessary attacks on creationist “theories” of evolution, or with examining the claims made by the pharma, food and alternative therapy industries. Many scientists are employed by these industries, and it’s for the independent researcher/ writer to offer the other side, or to examine claims more carefully.

It would have been so easy for Simon Singh to offer a ritual apology, and to save himself the trouble he’s been put to over the last twelve months. But he believes that his article addressed an important area of public awareness, especially with regard to children’s health—and he believes he did not defame chiropractors by drawing attention to the risks of the practice itself. “As a journalist,” he writes in a recent statement, “I have always been aware of the libel laws, but I don't think I ever fully appreciated the chilling effect they have on journalism - important articles are withdrawn and other stories are simply not commissioned because of the fear of libel.” It’s this absence, this rarely discussed silence, that Simon Singh and others like him are defending, in the UK and elsewhere.

Links:

From Ben Goldacre's site--the Matthias Rath chapter. Great reporting, and a frightening story.
From Sense About Science: Simon Singh's account of the trial