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.
facts life-is reason
Your conscious life is an elaborate after-the-fact rationalization of things you really do for other reasons.
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.
culture mythology civilisation
A culture without mythology is not really a civilisation.
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.
motivation inspiration thinking
Think about what artists, novelists and poets have in common: the ability to engage in metaphorical thinking, linking seemingly unrelated ideas, such as, 'It is the east, and Juliet is the Sun.'
world granted ability
Our ability to perceive the world around us seems so effortless that we tend to take it for granted.
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.
branches matter becoming
The boundary between neurology and psychiatry is becoming increasingly blurred, and its only a matter of time before psychiatry becomes just another branch of neurology.
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.