Somebody I met recently very kindly lent me a book by a remarkable neuroscientist called V. S. Ramachandran. A few years ago, a friend here in France – on learning of my fascination with neuroscience – let me borrow one of Ramachandran’s earlier efforts, Phantoms in the Brain. This was a book about amputees who could still feel limbs. My late Aunt Mollie lost a leg in 1932, but told me as a kid that she could still feel it quite clearly on occasions. It was for me the beginning of a lifetime hunger for books and movies about the line between physical existence in the present, and having a thought without any physicality about a past or future that was equally unreal.

After I retired in 2000, the interest was rekindled, but became more focused on the brain – it’s anatomy, the neurology that flowed from it, and the science that enabled it. With more time to devote to this subject, I became in turn interested in the physics of Time, the dilation of Time, and then (via Cognitive Behaviour Therapy) the leap that Buddhist teaching had made about all those things so long ago – Time is an illusion, everything is connected, and so forth.

But then (I think it was around 2003) I listened while driving to a BBC Radio Four programme about the kids that had been rescued from Nicolae Ceausescu’s Romanian orphanages. These unfortunate children had been starved of either love or family warmth from birth, but two truly remarkable facts emerged during the broadcast. First, that the children had almost completed adapted to familial adoption in England within a few months; and second, that they had grown parts of the brain in response to the learning experience – indeed, as part of it.

This amazing discovery overturned every assumption I had about the brain, and in medical circles rapidly led to the now universal acceptance of the existence of brain plasticity – ie, that it can increase the size and change the shape of certain areas when stimulated correctly to do so. I still doubt whether anyone has really grasped the phenomenal potential for good and evil that this finding represents. But for me, it held a reminder of Buddhist thought about reality, Now and the Universe we inhabit: the answer lies within. That is, between our ears.

By still feeling a limb that long ago disappeared into the hospital incinerator, the brain is creating its own reality…one that is out of kilter with what is. And here again, we return to still another Buddhist assertion: nothing is real. I was somehow, after a few years of retirement, back in 1954, and a child’s wonderment at Mollie’s ability to feel something unreal. What could all this mean?

A great deal of what it might mean for each of us is suggested by this later volume (written three years ago by Ramachandran) The tell-tale Brain. The book is not without faults as a popular read, I think: for me there are too many case histories, and quite a bit of phantom-limb repetition. But once the author starts to delve more philosophically into hypotheses and almost metaphysical speculation, it is gripping stuff.

If I tried to tell you everything about it, we’d be here all night – and anyway, that isn’t what I want to do. Rather, I’d like to share with you some of the thoughts it gave me in one particular area: the nature of self. Towards the end of the book, Ramachandran (let’s call him VS) himself refers to the quest for self and what it means as ‘one of the last great mysteries’. I think he’s right, but at the same time what has fired me up about the content of his latest work is that he has partially changed my mind about what human evolution on a macro level has perhaps been about, while at the same time redefining what individual personality is about on a micro level.

I don’t think it’s going too far to say that VS has blurred the very line between nature and nurture by pointing out some of the discoveries he and his team have made. Far from being a bad thing, I find it challenging – further proof if anyone needed it that there is no such thing as ‘settled science’.

For many years now I have criticised the great thinker Jacob Bronowski for referring to ‘the ascent of Man’. My reading and observations led me to believe decades ago that there was no real ascent at all, that Man is just a  clever ape who was given a large brain as a survival aid having come down from African trees during a long dry period of geological time. I have on this blog and in other books or articles referred to our species as one containing, for the most part, intelligent thugs. Now I’m not so sure.

In The tell-tale Brain, VS argues very persuasively that there are massive qualitative differences between Man and other apes, and that by no means all of these advances have been adaptations based purely on terrain, predators, climate or dietary changes. In every case of brain change for thousands of years now, the key gain has been one involving the subtlety of abstract thought – what he terms metarepresentations – and (more mechanically) decisions taken about which functions should be of higher importance than others. Thought processes and perceptions can blend to become an idea, but the various sensory elements are still performed separately. He describes, for instance, the case of one patient who – following serious brain trauma – could not recognise his father, and gave little or no response to any visual stimuli….but if his father went to another place to phone him on the telephone, the accident victim immediately perked up, and knew exactly who was on the phone.

This sort of finding leads directly to a challenging description of the nature of Self, and one that had a startling resonance for me: for VS concludes that there is no such thing as Fred’s personality, Anne’s nature, Bert’s character and so on. We are all, he says, a kaleidoscope of different and frequently contradictory elements. As a historian often encouraged against my will to reach firm conclusions about major figures from the past, this suggestion made eminent sense to me: I have always felt that such people are damnably difficult to pigeonhole. But as an individual myself, me, and what I’m about, it made total sense. There are far more than one of Me: and exactly the same applies to You.

The difference between most humans is not, I would suggest, whether they are nice or nasty, but what experiences they have undergone and the degree of aware introspection they indulge in about what the effects might or might not have been. Our experiences and inherited features – and the myriad interpretations we reach about them – are so complex, it would be impossible (if you think about it) to arrive at one consistent personality.

When I was younger – especially as a child – I was acutely aware of the different bits of Me. Both as a young man and even into middle age, I think too that I tried to hide some of those bits – in fact, at times felt guilty and depressed about the contradictions and apparent hypocrisy. In turn, I have formed views about friends, lovers, colleagues and so forth….and then been disappointed by behaviour that contradicted what they had seemed to me to “be about”.

VS asserts that this is bonkers, and unrealistic. But there is a paradox here – or at least, there is in my mind. Because on the one hand it suggests the need for a hugely tolerant and less judgemental approach to human behaviour ‘lapses’; but on the other, it almost provides the perfect excuse for “if it feels good, do it” – that is to say, infinite license of the sort displayed by Stevenson’s character Mr Hyde. Taken to an ultimate consequence, it allows every child murderer to say this bit of me pleads guilty, but that bit doesn’t.

I was around someone for many years who would excuse every appalling bit of thoughtless, near-inhuman behaviour by saying “I’m only human”. I would describe her as a bit dim in a controlling sort of way, but basically harmless, and genuinely happy.  Equally, I met a very intelligent and talented person last year whose zero self-awareness was both maddening and, in the end, funny, but whose loyalty to friends far surpassed anything of which I’ve ever been capable….and yet clearly doesn’t stand a chance of ever being happy.

Both knew nothing about themselves, both claimed to be happy, but one is and one isn’t. And that, of course, is just my perspective on them: I could be completely wrong in my conclusions. Not only am I My Self, I am a number of Selfs, and certainly not Your Self. Man is an island after all, but with various different Mans on the island. He doesn’t live on Your island, and never can.

My bottom line on all this so far is as follows. I think all of us lucky enough to be born with the ‘full set’ have instinctive and learned commonalities: fire hurts, food fills, water slakes, bright daylight is usually uplifting, dark corners suggest the unknown and evoke fear….and so on. But from the moment we become aware of inheritance and experience, all bets are off. We are all different, and each of us is lots of different ‘uses’. (Intriguing, is it not, that the concept of a plural ‘us’ is alien…and yet real.)

Every society, to be contented and at ease with its culture, needs to find the commonalities and be less judgemental about the differences. But every legal system must look within the commonalities in order to decide what differences can and can’t be tolerated in the context of the common good. Discuss.

This book has dazzled me like no other has for many a long year. But I’m left wondering whether the search is really for the Self at all, or the soul.

Special thanks go to Mmselle Tombois for the loan. I promise to return it.