In an interview on Science

You’ve chosen Phantoms in the Brain next.

I just couldn’t get over this book. The description of people with only one arm who believed they could clap. It’s just wonderful. It’s really about how people who have some physical injury to their brain can have fantasies that bear no relationship to reality whatsoever.

But Ramachandran, the author, isn't another Oliver Sacks?

No, not at all. He’s really a serious neuropsychiatrist. I’m very impressed by him.

Do you see any parallel at all between what Ramachandran’s investigation into the physical causes of bizarre alternative experiences and William James’s assertion that extreme religious experience is an authentic experience?

I do think there’s a connection, and in my book I argue that we have religious beliefs, mystical beliefs, embedded in our brain. One of the arguments is that if you take LSD, a boring bloody molecule, how could you possibly have these extraordinary experiences unless the experiences were already there? Well that’s my story, but Phantoms in the Brain is a wonderful book. A really marvellous book.

Phantoms concerns modern behavioural neurology, but your sixth book is about the distant past.

Yes, The Revolution of Wisdom. I’m interested in the origin of science, and Sir George Lloyd is the best writer on that. You see all science – people don’t like this – but all science as we know it began with the Greeks. They were the first society to think in that way and a lot of my ideas on this come from Lloyd. I am a scientist and I care about science, and Lloyd just writes so well about it. So the first scientist we know about is Thales [sixth century BC] who said that everything in the world was made out of water. It wasn’t a mystical thing. He was really trying to understand the world. One of my heroes of course is Archimedes, who I think is one of the greatest scientists who ever lived.

Why?

Because he had nobody else’s shoulders to stand on, and I want to tell you that working out buoyancy and specific gravity, quite apart from all his mathematical things, was just absolutely brilliant. Greek science is so important. Not that people didn’t make enormous contributions later, but it all started with the Greeks. The Chinese had no science at all. They had wonderful technology but understood nothing.

How would you describe the difference between technology and science?

Technology is about building things. The elephant, for example, is wonderful technology, yes? But evolution knows no science. It just selected those things that work. Yes, the difference between science and technology is absolutely fundamental. If you want to understand why the sun goes round the earth and things like that – that’s not technology.

There’s a theme running through these books and the way you talk about them which is hard to put my finger on, but which has something to do with human vulnerability. We’ve talked about science in the context of religion, risk and depression. Your last book is about what the authors call, The New Science of Darwinian Medicine. What does that mean?

I was introduced to the book by Randolph Nesse, who is one of its authors, and I even taught it at University College [London]. It’s really thinking about medical issues in evolutionary terms. So for example if you have a gene for sickle cell anaemia it prevents you from having malaria, and so there are lots of people with sickle cell anaemia in areas afflicted with malaria. But there are all sorts of evolutionary aspects to do with why one gets fat, mental illness, cancer and so on. It’s a very interesting book and a very important book I think. But it’s not a subject sufficiently taught in this country.