Speaker 4
Yeah, I mean, when I said you need to have an evolutionary
Speaker 1
perspective, it doesn't follow that every quirk of human behavior, every symptom you see has an evolutionary function. It could be a byproduct of something else that evolved for a specific function.
Speaker 6
Rama, we've got a fat and limbs. Yeah.
Speaker 6
all have a body image by virtue of the fact that we have a cerebral representation of our limbs. I think... When we lose the limb but keep the cortex, of course we have a phantom. There's no evolutionary function in that. Sure.
Speaker 1
I think Jonathan has answered your question for me. But let me emphasize also that in a sense your body is a phantom, as Jonathan just pointed out. This is
Speaker 2
Jonathan Miller. And
Speaker 1
again, not everything you see in clinical medicine, some sort of phenomenon like phantom limbs has an evolutionary function. I would say it's a consequence of the way in which the brain is wired up to represent your body and your amputate, you continue to feel the presence of the limb. Going back to the lower limb amputation, as you would predict, if you look at the pen field map, the representation of the genitals oddly enough is right next to where the representation of the foot is. And we have had many telephone calls and letters and emails from patients who claim that after amputation of the foot, stimulation of the genitals actually produces sensations in the phantom foot. In fact, one gentleman kept insisting he said that he actually experienced his orgasm in the phantom foot. And in fact, therefore it's much bigger than it used to be. So we can say we went
Speaker 2
to the first re-elect to 2003 and we went home with an explanation of why toe-sucking is so successful. We could go on and we shall. Next week we'll be in Edinburgh, the International Conference Centre for the second of the lectures, which will be focusing even more on self-awareness and consciousness. If you've driven for an hour along a busy motorway and don't remember doing it, you'll understand the kind of territory we're going to get into. My thanks to our audience here in London for launching us on this exploration of the emerging mind and thank you, of course, to our re-lecture, 2003 Villanor Ramachandran from the Royal Institution. Good
Speaker 5
night. Thank you. We are listening to a podcast from the archives of the BBC Reif Lectures. For more podcasts, please visit bbc.co.uk slash Radio 4.
