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Hull Fair has appeared in literary fiction before Scream If You Want To Go Faster. In Alan Sillitoe’s Saturday Night And Sunday Morning the hero Arthur takes a brutal kicking at the local Fair, the Nottingham Goose Fair to give its full and traditional title. But after it says farewell to the Midlands, the Nottingham Goose Fair takes the M62 north and changes its name to Hull. I have no idea what happens to the Geese.

I loved Hull Fair when I was a kid. For me, it symbolized the start of a long spell of protracted celebration: my birthday, Halloween, Bonfire Night and then the big one, Christmas. Long dark nights lit up with raw excitement. And it all kicked off down Walton Street in the second week of October.

Hull Fair meant going out in the cold pitch-black and staying up late on a school night. It meant racing lights, head-pounding music, screaming crowds and a stomach heaving with excitement.

The buildup was epic. All week at school you’d hear the kids who’d already been to Fair bragging about the rides they’d been on and parading the exotic plunder they’d brought back. Like Space Dust, the special exploding candy that made the inside of your skull snap crackle and pop. It was magic stuff, like having a head full of static electricity. Space Dust was like glue sniffing for eight year olds. I remember one little lad emptying an entire packet into his mouth and an excited crowd clustering around him to see what would happen. Would he pass out? Maybe he’d explode! Maybe his head would shoot from his scrawny little shoulders, fly up into the damp autumn sky like a super-charged space rocket and explode in a fanfare of sparks. But nothing happened. He necked the lot and then walked away laughing through a mouthful of foam. He was like the Keith Richards of West Hull Primary School.

When the big night finally rolled around it was like being injected with a hypo of raw adrenaline. I’d be almost beside myself with excitement, bouncing around on the top deck of the bus, rubbing portholes in the steamed up windows, straining for the first glimpse of that halo of light.  

As soon as you took your first steps down Walton Street you were besieged on all sides by gaudy temptation. It was like you’d died and gone straight to a seven year olds heaven. There were stalls stacked high with all manner of sweets and treats; giant slabs of pink and white nougat, bags of buttery brandy snap, coconuts banked up like hairy cannonballs, hanging bags of candy-floss, giant red and black licorice laces, sticky red toffee apples and chocolate dipped ones too, smothered in hundreds and thousands. There were steaming chip vans that stank of hot fat and vinegar. Other stalls would be groaning with cut-price piles of treasure, toy swords and dolls, wind up action figures and flashing yo-yos, fuzzy gonks and gremlins, Lucky Dip barrels packed with unknown pleasures buried beneath the sawdust. There was the LP On A String stall, where you hoped to reel in The Soundtrack to Grease or Never Mind The Bollocks but invariably ended up with The Best Of Timi Yuro or The Brighouse and Rastrick Band’s Twenty Golden Greats. My Dad said it was a bloody swizzle and deep down I knew he was right, but hope springs eternal in the breast of an infant pop fan.

Dotted between these emporiums of tat were the street hawkers and vendors, the ruddy-faced men with fistfuls of multi-coloured balloons, the Father Christmases with the nicotine stained fingers and the black bin bags full of early presents, the street preachers jabbing their fingers straight up to heaven, where they claimed Jesus was waiting for us if we would only lift our eyes to see him. The gypsy caravans, the daughters of the ancient sages and soothsayers beckoning you from doorways, offering the gift of second sight, as recommended by Vera Duckworth, Des O’Connor and Orville The Duck; fading faces on the posters outside their portable palaces.

And as you moved through this magical place, besieged on all sides by offers of instant gratification and promises of eternal redemption, your tiny hand gripped in the fist of a parent or older cousin, you always had one eye out for the opening, that gap in the stalls and shows and caravans that would afford you entry into the Fair proper, to the rides and the promise of mayhem beyond.

Hull Fair rides were the stuff of legend. Every year the local paper would scream headlines of kids being catapulted from the newly imported death traps from Europe - the Octopus, the Meteorite, the Dive Bombers, and the Bungee Jump. You would crane your neck to gawp up at these creaking cathedrals of light as their passengers were flung around at breakneck speed, their legs kicking the air above your tiny head and their shrieks of delight whipped away on the wind.

When I got old enough to go on my own or with my mates, Hull Fair took on another dimension completely. As a teenager, the Fair was about courtship ritual and mob mentality, a complete immersion in sensory pleasure, necking various combinations of medicines to aid and abet the carousels of colour. There are a million other stories from these times, some of which ended up in Scream If You Want To Go Faster. But to me now, as a dull and sensory numbed adult, Hull Fair provides a direct connection back to that first thrill of childhood, the drawing in of the darkness, my breath hung in plumes on the freezing October night, and that halo of light above the city where I grew up.

Scream if you Want to Go Faster is out now at Amazon, Play, Waterstones, and all good bookshops.

Some of the fantastic coverage of The Tell-Tale Brain from the past few days, as well as author VS Ramachandran’s fascinating TED talk ‘On Your Mind’. Click here to read an extract.

Compelling [and] fascinating - Nicholas Shakespeare, TELEGRAPH

His mission to educate and entertain is perfectly achieved… Neuroscience and stand-up comedy collide with eureka results. ‘[Ramachandran's] “modest contribution to the grand attempt to crack the code of the human brain”, is written with all his synapses lit up like supernovas.‘ TIMES

‘When VS Ramachandran, one of the world’s most influential neurologists, wants to get inside a human head, he doesn’t reach for his scalpel or MRI scanner.  Instead, like Sherlock Holmes (to whom he is often compared), he seizes on an oddity in a case study, then begins a pleasing process of deduction interspersed with leaps of excitingly creative thought.  This absorbing book charts the acclaimed experiments he has performed around the world…and explains how they have helped unravel the workings of the human mind.’    SUNDAY TIMES

‘Excellent…My favourite of the trio is The Tell-Tale Brain; I cannot imagine a better account of the sweep of contemporary neuroscience… The Tell-Tale Brain explains how and why the human brain makes us “truly unique and special, not ‘just’ another species of ape”… will give pleasure to anyone interested in original thinking about the brain.’  FINANCIAL TIMES (round-up of neuroscience books including Oliver Sacks’ The Mind’s Eye)

***** ‘Our brains are those of apes: Ramachandran is in no doubt of that, yet at the same time we’re uniquely special too. His life’s work has been about getting to grips with the mental mechanisms that make the miraculous mundane. He goes to real-life clinical cases for evidence of exactly how the brain behaves in action or examines the experimental record for clues to the wonderful intricacy and astonishing scope of the human mind.’ SCOTSMAN

‘An enthusiastic speculator who rarely hesitates in his opinions, he’s a gifted storyteller … Perhaps his greatest strength is his ability to turn neurological case studies into illuminating experiments.’ BBC FOCUS magazine

‘A Holmesian look at what we learn about human nature when the brain goes wrong, written by one of the leading neuroscientists in the world.’ Times (Eureka)

Mentioned in NEW STATESMEN ‘Books to look out for in 2011‘

 ‘As one of the most prolific neuroscientists of our time, everyone wants a piece of him… Ramachandran speeds from one fascinating topic to the next, with an excitement that’s somewhere between a young researcher on the verge of a great discovery and a small child on a sugar rush… it’s impossible to curb his enthusiasm.’  Interview in NEW SCIENTIST

An extract from the critically acclaimed The Tell-Tale Brain by VS Ramachandran.

“Now I am quite sure that if we had these three creatures fossilized or preserved in spirits for comparison and were quite unprejudiced judges, we should at once admit that there is very little greater interval as animals between the gorilla and the man than exists between the gorilla and the baboon.”

-THOMAS HENRY HUXLEY, lecturing at the Royal Institution, London

“I know, my dear Watson, that you share my love of all that is bizarre and outside the conventions and humdrum routine of everyday life.”

-SHERLOCK HOLMES

Is man an ape or an angel (as Benjamin Disraeli asked in a famous debate about Darwin’s theory of evolution)? Are we merely chimps with a software upgrade? Or are we in some true sense special, a species that transcends the mindless fluxions of chemistry and instinct? Many scientists, beginning with Darwin himself, have argued the former: that human mental abilities are merely elaborations of faculties that are ultimately of the same kind we see in other apes. This was a radical and controversial proposal in the nineteenth century-some people are still not over it-but ever since Darwin published his world-shattering treatise on the theory of evolution, the case for man’s primate origins has been bolstered a thousandfold. Today it is impossible to seriously refute this point: We are anatomically, neurologically, genetically, physiologically apes. Anyone who has ever been struck by the uncanny near-humanness of the great apes at the zoo has felt the truth of -this.

I find it odd how some people are so ardently drawn to either-or dichotomies. “Are apes self-aware or are they automata?” “Is life meaningful or is it meaningless?” “Are humans ‘just’ animals or are we exalted?” As a scientist I am perfectly comfortable with settling on categorical conclusions-when it makes sense. But with many of these supposedly urgent metaphysical dilemmas, I must admit I don’t see the conflict. For instance, why can’t we be a branch of the animal kingdom and a wholly unique and gloriously novel phenomenon in the -universe?

I also find it odd how people so often slip words like “merely” and “nothing but” into statements about our origins. Humans are apes. So too we are mammals. We are vertebrates. We are pulpy, throbbing colonies of tens of trillions of cells. We are all of these things, but we are not “merely” these things. And we are, in addition to all these things, something unique, something unprecedented, something transcendent. We are something truly new under the sun, with uncharted and perhaps limitless potential. We are the first and only species whose fate has rested in its own hands, and not just in the hands of chemistry and instinct. On the great Darwinian stage we call Earth, I would argue there has not been an upheaval as big as us since the origin of life itself. When I think about what we are and what we may yet achieve, I can’t see any place for snide little “merelies.”

Any ape can reach for a banana, but only humans can reach for the stars. Apes live, contend, breed, and die in forests-end of story. Humans write, investigate, create, and quest. We splice genes, split atoms, launch rockets. We peer upward into the heart of the Big Bang and delve deeply into the digits of pi. Perhaps most remarkably of all, we gaze inward, piecing together the puzzle of our own unique and marvelous brain. It makes the mind reel. How can a three-pound mass of jelly that you can hold in your palm imagine angels, contemplate the meaning of infinity, and even question its own place in the cosmos? Especially awe inspiring is the fact that any single brain, including yours, is made up of atoms that were forged in the hearts of countless, far-flung stars billions of years ago. These particles drifted for eons and light-years until gravity and chance brought them together here, now. These atoms now form a conglomerate-your brain-that can not only ponder the very stars that gave it birth but can also think about its own ability to think and wonder about its own ability to wonder. With the arrival of humans, it has been said, the universe has suddenly become conscious of itself. This, truly, is the greatest mystery of -all.

It is difficult to talk about the brain without waxing lyrical. But how does one go about actually studying it? There are many methods, ranging from single-neuron studies to high-tech brain scanning to cross-species comparison. The methods I favor are unapologetically old-school. I generally see patients who have suffered brain lesions due to stroke, tumor, or head injury and as a result are experiencing disturbances in their perception and consciousness. I also sometimes meet people who do not appear brain damaged or impaired, yet report having wildly unusual perceptual or mental experiences. In either case, the procedure is the same: I interview them, observe their behavior, administer some simple tests, take a peek at their brains (when possible), and then come up with a hypothesis that bridges psychology and neurology-in other words, a hypothesis that connects strange behavior to what has gone wrong in the intricate wiring of the brain. A decent percentage of the time I am successful. And so, patient by patient, case by case, I gain a stream of fresh insights into how the human mind and brain work-and how they are inextricably linked. On the coattails of such discoveries I often get evolutionary insights as well, which bring us that much closer to understanding what makes our species - unique.

The Tell-Tale Brain by VS Ramachandran is out now in Amazon, Waterstones.com, Play, and your local bookshop.

Vilayanur S. Ramachandran is Director of the Centre for the Brain at the University of California, San Diego. He has a PhD from Cambridge and many honours and awards including a fellowship from All Souls College, Oxford. He lectures widely on art, visual perception and the brain, gave the 2003 BBC Recith Lectures, and is the author of the critically acclaimed Phantoms in the Brain, which was the basis for a two part series on Channel Four TV. Newsweek recently named him one of the ‘hundred most prominent people to watch in the next century.’