The Tell-Tale Brain: A Neuroscientist's Quest for What Makes Us Human

I thoroughly enjoyed this book. Do take some time to look at the included PDF before you start listening otherwise you will be frustrated at various points. The book does repeat some things from other of Ramachandran???s books, but it was all stuff that was interesting enough to bear repeating. The book also becomes speculative at points, but the author notes where experimental results end and speculation begins and he also points out that speculation is an important part of the scientific method. The speculation becomes a little wild near the end of the book when the author attempts to frame art in term of neuroscience, but it was interesting to think about nevertheless. The book mostly describes unusual neurological conditions, links them to specific brain regions, and describes experiments to test related theories. This is quite good fun if you are in to that sort of thing ??? if you are not, it might seem dry.

Takes a potentially boring and tedious subject and makes it fascinating. One of those rare books whose perspective is a combination of entertaining, enlightening and understandable. This book is well narrated too. Actually kept me awake and entranced during a long boring trip. After reading this book you will have a much better sense of how the brain works, how science advances and how top of the profession physicians think.

Deemed the “Marco Polo” of neuroscience by Richard Dawkins, V. S. Ramachandran brings his thinking and research to the general reader in The Tell-Tale Brain: A Neuroscientist’s Quest for What Makes Us Human. If you have no background in the field of neuroscience or neuroplasticity, this is about as good a place to start as any. If you have been reading literature available for the general public in this area, the book is still very helpful. Ramachandran is a graceful and clear writer. The benefit of this book is its breadth of coverage. For example, he visits phantom limb syndrome, devotes a chapter to the relationship between seeing and knowing, and autism is addressed in a very thoughtful, generous manner. Most interesting me to personally was his discussion of aesthetics and the brain. This is an excellent book and I hope that we hear more from Ramachandran in the near future. The reading of David Drummond is very good.

At last, the great Indian neurologist Ramachandran comes to Audible! I have enjoyed his lectures on youtube for years, and it is great to see him in audible book form. The Tell-Tale Brain is in the same cannon as medical tales told by Sachs and Selzer, though Ramachandran does not quite have the literary turn of either of these two writers. He does present his material for both expert and layman (both will readily understand if proper attention is given the work), and there is humor and cultural references to move things along and make the material easier to relate to, though again, he doesn't quite have the nearly stand-up style of say a Pinker. Nonetheless, there is simply no one who can render the oddities and complexities of the brain and perception like the great Ramachandran, perhaps the best medical genius of our time, our Einstein of the neuron. This book is worth every bit you pay for it and more, and I certainly hope to see more works by this explorer of the mind and brain on Audible soon.

The book gave me more reasons why humans are different from anything else known in the universe and how we got that way.

I've been looking for a book like this one which takes all the anomalies and traumas that have happened to individuals and weaves them all together in a coherent story about how our mind works and doesn't work. The mind is a wonderful thing to understand and this book goes a long way in helping me understand it.

The author has one of the best droll sense of humors I have ever come across while listening and he made me laugh out loud multiple times. The narrator really knew how to add the proper amount of drollness and added to the experience.

This is one of the few books where I lost something by listening instead of reading. I would get confused when he talked about some of the illustrations of the optical illusions under discussion and when he talks and names different areas of the brain, I would get lost and forget which region does what. Overall, even if I had read the book with the maps of the brain, I wouldn't have followed the names of the regions of the brain, but be warned, it does get very confusing while listening.

Having read Ramachandran in the past I was looking forward to this latest offering. Unfortunately the first half of the book is simply a rehash of his previous books. Overall this book was a disappointment and I can't recommend it

Having heard of Ramachandran's work before reading this book, I had high expectations. Some of those were fulfilled, in hearing about synaesthesia and mirror neurons. However there is also a huge amount of plain discussion and even sheer speculation about art, beauty, and the evolution of human preferences. For example, he invents a list of principles of aesthetics, without reference to any artists or prior thinking on the subject. Overall there was enough science to make it interesting. The narration is a bit breathless, like listening to 777-FILM.

I enjoyed the stories. There is a lot of information in this book that can bring about serious discussions. Would like to hear more books by this author.

? just what exactly do we know about how the brain works
? if we did know more, could we then understand ourselves better
? who'd be bright enough to both understand and explain all this

v.s. ramachandran is more than up to this monumental task
the explosion of new detailed brain studies provides his raw material
his near mythic status in the medical community provides his authority

years ago using only a mirror and a q-tip he unraveled "phantom pain"
this sad, untreatable condition had been recognized for centuries
it took someone of ramachandran's blazing insight to solve its' riddle

he clearly sees himself as flying at an altitude that others only dream of
a lack of confidence doesn't seem to be a problem he has ever had
but it takes that sort of hubris to tackle an issue this vast and significant

the anatomical nomenclature will probably over whelm some readers
the rapid pace of new discoveries means he'll need a new edition in a few years
this is a very exciting time in history to be an investigational neuroscientist

the most exciting sections of the book dealt with neuro-plasticity
? can nerves and nerve signals be repaired or rerouted
? can we contemplate therapy for diseases we once thought were untreatable

recent advances in neuro-imaging and function studies rival the discovery of DNA
we now have a window into that most human and complex of all organs
this book is a compelling first step in understanding this bold, new world

A really fascinating book, combining cognitive science with speculation about the nature of consciousness (and clearly differentiating between the two). The tone is rather pompous (and the reader doesn't help) but the real problem is that sentences and phrases get repeated verbatim throughout the book, making you wonder if you hit the wrong button on your iPod.