07/11/2022
Ramachandran is an internationally renowned neuroscientist for conducting research and coming up with quick answers to the questions about human nature that his predecessors failed to address. Daniel Schacter is an American psychologist, and Pierre Paul Broca is a renowned physician. As such, one of the reasons or motivating factors behind these authors’ articles was to answer questions that other neuroscientists had failed to address about the human brain. According to the encounter with patients who had bizarre neurological disorders, Dr Ramachandran wanted to know who we are and how we construct our body image, why we laugh or become depressed, why we may also believe in God, how we make decisions as humans, how we deceive ourselves, and how we dream when sleeping (Ramachandran & Dolan, 1998). Additionally, Daniel Schacter wanted to understand the nature and functions of human memory using neuropsychological and cognitive means (Schacter & Addis, 2007). Where else, Pierre Paul Broca wanted to understand and also form a theory of how the brain controls motor functions.
The book Phantoms in the Brain is full of paradoxical facts that were only eminent as a result of the authors' long and thorough investigations on the brain of a patient while their brain is paralysed, missing portions of their bodies such as legs, or suffering from diseases such as Capra's disease (Ramachandran & Dolan, 1998). While Schacter seeks explanations for such brain paradoxes, Daniel Schacter depicts a significant brain quirk, namely memory. Pierre Paul Broca wanted to understand if memory can personalise a person (Paul Broca, 1824–1880). Additionally, Dr Ramachandran wanted to understand what caused the reactions in the patients with different conditions. Additionally, the hypothesis or the research question that could have encouraged Dr Ramachandran, Pierre Paul Broca, and Daniel Schacter to conduct the study was "what are the effects of differentiations in the brain?" They wanted to explain how people’s brains work based on the cases they had encountered with different patients.
