Summary

Ramachandran starts The Tell-Tail Brain with a preface, in which he introduces himself, his research and his field of study to the reader. He talks about how neuroscience started to reach its peak quite recently, especially compared to other scientific disciplines. For this reason, he says, many exciting discoveries have been made, but much is still left to discover. He says that the claims he makes in this book will be based on a combination of data, logic he extrapolates from the data and some speculation.

Ramachandran then gives an introduction that serves as a crash-course anatomy lesson on the human brain. The human brain is made up of about 100 billion neurons, which form connected networks in order to transmit and process information. There are nearly 100 named structures in the human brain, all made up of neuron networks, all with their...