Vilayanur S. Ramachandran
Vilayanur S. Ramachandran
Vilayanur Subramanian Ramachandranis a neuroscientist known primarily for his work in the fields of behavioral neurology and visual psychophysics. He is currently a Professor in the Department of Psychology and the Graduate Program in Neurosciences at the University of California, San Diego...
NationalityIndian
ProfessionScientist
CountryIndia
numbers people brain
There are 100 billion neurons in the adult human brain, and each neuron makes something like 1,000 to 10,000 contacts with other neurons in the brain. Based on this, people have calculated that the number of permutations and combinations of brain activity exceeds the number of elementary particles in the universe.
hands space brain
Here is this three-pound mass of jelly you can hold in the palm of your hand, and it can contemplate the vastness of interstellar space. It can contemplate the meaning of infinity and it can contemplate itself contemplating on the meaning of infinity.
religious love-life ambition
Even though its common knowledge these days, it never ceases to amaze me that all the richness of our mental life - all our feelings, our emotions, our thoughts, our ambitions, our love life, our religious sentiments and even what each of us regards us his own intimate private self - is simply the activity of these little specks of jelly in your head, in your brain. There is nothing else.
brain curiosity path
Curiosity illuminates the correct path to anything in life. If you're not curious, that's when your brain is starting to die.
brain facts fiction
The adage that fact is stranger than fiction seems to be especially true for the workings of the brain.
fighting order organization
The visual system of the brain has the organization, computational profile, and architecture it has in order to facilitate the organism's thriving at the four Fs: feeding fleeing, fighting, and reproduction.
brain mind asking
Lofty questions about the mind are fascinating to ask, philosophers have been asking them for three millennia both in India where I am from and here in the West - but it is only in the brain that we can eventually hope to find the answers.
romantic-love games mistress
Science is like a love affair with nature; an elusive, tantalising mistress. It has all the turbulence, twists and turns of romantic love, but thats part of the game.
dividing era interests somebody span though victorian
My interests span biology, though sometimes I feel like an anachronism, somebody from the Victorian era when there weren't so many boundaries dividing the sciences.
although art distort la people precisely randomly
You can't just take an image and randomly distort it and call it art - although many people in La Jolla where I come from do precisely that.
knows metaphors
Everyone knows that metaphors are important, yet we have no idea why.
wired
It may well be our brains are wired up to be slightly more optimistic than they should be.