The fun is followed up by explanation or theoretical speculation with more general implications, and often by imaginative and elegantly simple experiments. While both books are richly thought-provoking, in general Ramachandran s book makes for more compelling reading of the two, because of its wealth of clinical details, the lucidity of his theorizing, and the ease with which he moves between them. His final chapter on consciousness is the least persuasive, but is detachable from the rest and will not be discussed here. Ramachandran is well known for his work on phantom limbs, and his chapters on this topic are not to be missed. Patients who have lost limbs frequently experience their lost limb vividly as still with them.
Patients also have sensory experience in their phantoms.
Brain areas that receive sensory input from the face are adjacent to those that normally receive sensory input from the hand. In the absence of input from a hand, the disused hand target areas are colonized by neighboring face inputs. As a result, when the face is touched, the brain hallucinates the missing hand. Similarly, following auditory nerve damage, inputs from eye movement may invade disused auditory target areas, so that eye movement is heard as tinnitus. Thus the brain circuitry of an adult can change, and with astonishing rapidity.