Author: V. S. Ramachandran

Ramachandran works out what the brain does by finding people in whom something has gone wrong, then testing an idea with cotton buds and mirrors rather than with a scanner. Mirror box therapy, which relieves phantom limb pain by giving the brain a reflection of the remaining hand, grew out of that approach and cost almost nothing. Phantoms in the Brain and The Tell-Tale Brain cover synaesthesia, Capgras delusion, and patients who deny that an arm belongs to them. Some of his larger claims about mirror neurons are contested by other neuroscientists. He trained in medicine in India and runs a laboratory in San Diego.