Podcast on Capgras

Podcast on Capgras

In the Podcast on radiolab.org Doctor’s Ramachandran and Berman tell stories and express their ideas on patients they have diagnosed with a disorder called “Capgras” which, upon first listen sounds like a form of Alzheimer’s or dementia. However upon further explaination by the doctors on their patients cases, and some insight from Dr. Berman who deals with a husband with Capgras on a daily basis it is easier to understand how this unique mental disorder can relate to the identity theory, in Dr. Ramachandran’s case, and nonreductive physicalism, in the experience of Dr. Berman.

Dr. Ramachandran recounts a story of a patient who after awakening from a two week long coma, does not recognize his mother for herself, but rather as an imposter. She looks like his mother and sounds like his mother, but somehow the patients brain is lacking the emotional connection that enables him to recognize her for who she is. This relates to the identidy theory, which indicates that the mind and the brain operate and function together as one, because Dr. Ramachandran explains in his story that the research shows that although both functions necessary for recognition may be happening in the mind, there is a “cut wire” in the brain inhibiting the patients function to recognize his mother as herself and his minds ability to “feel” him as his mother, which Dr. Ramachandran reiterates when he says “our thought processes are much more dependant on our gut level feelings than we realize” our gut level feelings stemming from the “mind”, not necessarily the “brains.”

Dr. Berman’s story applies to nonreductive physicalism because nonreductive physicalism is the idea that mental states, while caused by physical states, cannot always be explained by one physical property. In her story a patient returns home one day to see, in her eyes, a strange man (her husband) sitting on the couch. She recognizes parts of him, such as his clothing, as her husband, but not the person as...