The Tell Tale Brain

Being Human and Self-Awareness Throughout the entirety of The Tell Tale Brain the author, V.S Ramachandran makes distinct points regarding what makes humans, well human. He describes this determining factor as self-awareness. In his book he points out that self-awareness not only makes us human but also wants us to be more. Essentially, it makes us always want to be better than what we are and, as humans, this is unique to only us. Ramachandran defines self-awareness as “This aspect of the self is almost axiomatic; a self that is not aware of itself is an oxymoron” (Ramachandran, 4356). This paper will demonstrate Ramachandran’s case studies that he uses to support his theory of self-awareness and what makes it so unique to us. In
Jake had no episodic memories. This was caused by the damage he suffered to both parts of his temporal and frontal lobes. In addition to having no memories, Jake did not have the ability to create new ones. Though he had memory loss, Jake still withheld his semantic memories. They included general information about love, the world and other random things. Ramachandran noted that even though Jake had loss of his memory, some of his sense of self was still intact. In fact, his sense of self was just inhibited but not gone. This may have been a different story if both his semantic and episodic memories were to vanish, but there has never been a case relating to that. In the off chance that losing both episodic and semantic memory, Ramachandran suggests one would definitely lose their sense of self. How would they be able to identify themselves, talk, or understanding anything? Meaning without you sense of self and memory, what do we really
Jason received a head injury as a result of a car accident that caused him him to be in a coma for about three months. After his como, Jason could not walk, talk or even initiate actions. But most surprisingly he could not recognize his family nor anyone else. However, the interesting aspect of this case is that Jason could actually recognize people he talked to on the phone, just not in person. Jason essentially had something called telephone syndrome. Ramachandran explains this as if there were two Jason’s that are trapped inside one body. This is because Jason’s accident had a large impact on his auditory and visual pathways in his brain. Essentially, his pathways were somewhat segregated thus inhibiting his sense of self and free will. Ramachandran noted that “Jason lacks the ability to form rich, meaningful metarepresentations, which are essential to not only our uniqueness as a species but also our uniqueness as individuals and our sense of self” (Ramachandran,