How the mind works

Sometimes you come across something that broadens your horizon, deepens insight, and so on. The following article by Israel Rosenfield and Edward Ziff in this month's New York Review had that effect on me -- How the Mind Works: Revelations. In it, Rosenfield and Ziff explain the latest biological research into how our minds work, including how we form memories and how we are conscious of ourselves and our surroundings. One amazing experiment about the "phantom pain" experienced by people who have lost a limb is described as follows:

One famous case is that of a young man who had lost his hand in a motorcycle accident. In a therapeutic procedure devised by V.S. Ramachandran, and described in his book with Sandra Blakeslee, Phantoms in the Brain, the patient put his intact hand in one side of a box and "inserted" his phantom hand in the other side. As the illustration on this page shows, one section of the box had a vertical mirror, which showed a reflection of his intact hand. The patient observed in the mirror the image of his real hand, and was then asked to make similar movements with both "hands," which suggested to the brain real movement from the lost hand. Suddenly the pain disappeared. Though the young man was perfectly aware of the trick being played on him —the stump of his amputated arm was lying in one section of the box—the visual image overcame his sense of being tricked. Seeing is believing! Pain—the consequence of the incoherence between the brain's creation of a phantom limb and the visual realization that the limb does not exist—disappeared; what was seen (a hand in the mirror) matched what was felt (a phantom).

The implications of some of this research are astounding. For example, how can we fully trust line-up identifications when memories "can be modified by the addition of new information?"