V.S. Ramachandran Quotes
Curiosity illuminates the correct path to anything in life. If you're not curious, that's when your brain is starting to die.
Your conscious life is an elaborate after-the-fact rationalization of things you really do for other reasons.
What the neurology tells us is that the self consists of many components, and the notion of one unitary self may well be an illusion.
People often ask how I got interested in the brain; my rhetorical answer is: 'How can anyone NOT be interested in it?' Everything you call 'human nature' and consciousness arises from it.
Great art allows you to transcend your mortal frame and to reach for the stars. I think great science does the same thing.
With the arrival of humans, it has been said, the universe has suddenly become conscious of itself. This, truly, it the greatest mystery of all.
The adage that fact is stranger than fiction seems to be especially true for the workings of the brain.
Our ability to perceive the world around us seems so effortless that we tend to take it for granted.
Yet as human beings we have to accept-with humility-that the question of ultimate origins will always remain with us, no matter how deeply we understand the brain and the cosmos that it creates.
Remember that politics, colonialism, imperialism and war also originate in the human brain.
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.'
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.
Any ape can reach for a banana, but only humans can reach for the stars.
Without ducking responsibility, what's wrong with medicine today is that it is predicated on providing treatment, not on reducing suffering. Not on solving problems.
If we knew about the real facts and statistics of mortality, we’d be terrified.
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.
Even today no computer can understand language as well as a three-year-old or see as well as a mouse.
You cant 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.
If you're a thinking person, the liver is interesting, but nothing is more intriguing than the brain.
He had the arrogance of the believer, but none of the humility of the deeply religious.