How 'bizarre' behaviours made this scientist appreciate what the brain can do

17:28A new book looks at the fragility and malleability of the mind

Marc Dingman is very passionate about neuroscience. He teaches a course on brain and behavior to students at Pennsylvania State University. He has a YouTube channel and a website dedicated to simple explanations of common neuroscience topics. And when he's not doing all that, he's writing books about the brain. 

His interest in neuroscience was first sparked after learning about an unusual behavioral condition called alien hand syndrome, a condition where a person's limb performs actions without the owner's conscious intent. "When I read about this, I was just kind of blown away that this type of behavior can emerge from the brain," Dingman said. Wishing to learn more, he eventually pursued a doctorate in this field. 

Now he wants to share the types of cases that got him interested in the inner workings of the human brain. His new book is Bizarre: The most peculiar cases of human behavior and what they tell us about how the brain works.

Dingman spoke with Quirks & Quarks host Bob McDonald about the stories he shares in the book. Here's part of their conversation.

You divide your book into themed chapters that are based on different categories of unusual behavior. My favorite is absence. Break that one down for me.  

So in that chapter, I talk about things that are part of our normal experiences that people can lose. And so, for example, I started the chapter out talking about an individual who, after reading for 50 years of his life, sits down to read the newspaper and suddenly realizes that he doesn't remember how to read. 

And there's other cases of individuals, for example, that lose their ability to perceive faces, so they can't register when they're looking at a face that it's actually a face. So I kind of use these cases as a demonstration of how critical many of these functions are as part of our daily lives. But we often don't appreciate them. 

Many patients you mentioned in the book experience changes to their identity because of changes in their brain. Can you give me an example of one of those? 

The one that stands out the most to me is a condition called clinical lycanthropy. This is a condition where patients ... believe they have experienced or can experience turning into another animal. The word lycanthropy refers to werewolves, and so some people believe that they can turn into wolves. But [it's] also a general belief in the ability to turn into another animal. So in the book, I talk about an individual who believes he's a cat and has for over a decade. There's cases that I found in doing research for the book of people believing they can turn into a variety of animals, ranging from a snake to a gerbil. And so this is obviously a very drastic change in identity. 

So what does it tell us about the role of our brain and our sense of self? 

A lot. Our sense of self is tied tightly to our brain. And, you know, my belief as a neuroscientist is that our brain creates that sense of self. And so one of the things that writing this book really impressed upon me is that the sense of self – that we feel is immutable and is part of us throughout our entire lives – can be changed pretty easily through an event like a traumatic brain injury or a stroke. Many of the patients I talk about in the book had one event and the next day they were completely different for the rest of their lives. 

Now, another common theme in your book is that many ways in which we thought the brain works have been proven wrong. Can you give me an example of that? 

Initially, we thought that complex functions in the brain might be linked back to one specific area of the brain. And so while there are some more complex functions that might be localized in a certain area of the brain, we now know that really complex cognition involves large networks that are spread throughout the brain. And so this is something that is kind of an evolving idea in neuroscience, and it has made things more complicated when we're trying to understand complex cognition. We now know that we can't just look to one part of the brain – we have to understand a network that might be spread throughout the brain, which is more difficult to untangle. 

So what would you identify as the biggest mystery in neuroscience now? 

Well, there's a lot. But I think if I were to pick one, it might be just the mystery of what causes consciousness. So we can work out simple processes in the brain, like how a movement is generated or how a visual image is perceived. And we can even get a sense of some of the more complex functions, like how we attend to specific stimuli in our environment. But we have very little understanding of how consciousness is produced: how and why we have a state of awareness of what's going on in our minds and all around us; how this is integrated with the passage of time, the memory of past events, anticipation of future events. It's something that we can't trace back to one brain region or even one network.

Well, you also end on a very positive note that if you have one and it's working well, appreciate it now. 

Yeah, because we take it for granted too often. And I think that the cases in my book really demonstrate that we can have these changes to the way our brain works without any warning. One day we can be very different from the next if we have a stroke or we have a traumatic brain injury. So I do think it's really important if we have a functioning brain, a functioning body, to appreciate that and take advantage of it. 

This Q&A has been condensed for length and clarity.