Eternal Puzzle

Vilayanur Ramachandran was one of the India-born bright sparks most likely to win a Nobel in the next 10 years. Your columnist made that prophecy for Outlook magazine along with a jury comprising five scientists and a science writer.

With two more years to go, what are the neuroscientist's chances of fulfilling the forecast? The Nobel jury has still to come in on that. Meanwhile, the Nobel laureate Eric Kandel has called Ramachandran "the modern Paul Broca, the great French neurologist who opened up the biological analysis of higher mental functions".

Another boffin has upped the ante with "Galileo of neurocognition"! Rama first became known for his work on visual illusions and on phantom limb pain in amputees. Was that ghost limb pain similar to the lie called art, to paraphrase Pablo Picasso, which makes us realise the truth? Rama has a number of speculative sallies for such paradoxes.

He also seems all too aware of the pitfalls: "Science tells us we are merely beasts," he said in his BBC Reith Lecture Series, "but we don't feel like that. We feel like angels trapped inside the bodies of beasts, forever craving transcendence." That is indeed the essential human predicament in a nutshell, Ramachandran writes in his newest offering, The Tell-Tale Brain.

He cites Darwin, "I feel most deeply that is whole question of Creation is too profound for human intellect," only to end his own tome with humility: "The question of ultimate origins will always remain with us, no matter how deeply we understand the brain and the cosmos that it creates."