We are not angels, we are merely sophisticated apes. Yet we feel like angels trapped inside the bodies of beasts, craving transcendence and all the time trying to spread our wings and fly off, and it's really a very odd… — Vilayanur S. Ramachandran Copy Share Image
Ask, 'How are we different from the great apes?' We have culture, we have civilisation, and we have language to be celebrated as part of being human. — Vilayanur S. Ramachandran Copy Share Image
It may well be our brains are wired up to be slightly more optimistic than they should be. — Vilayanur S. Ramachandran Copy Share Image
If you're a thinking person, the liver is interesting, but nothing is more intriguing than the brain. — Vilayanur S. Ramachandran Copy Share Image
Even today no computer can understand language as well as a three-year-old or see as well as a mouse. — Vilayanur S. Ramachandran Copy Share Image
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. — Vilayanur S. Ramachandran Copy Share Image
There is no real independent self, aloof from other human beings, inspecting the world, inspecting other people. You are, in fact, connected not just… — Vilayanur S. Ramachandran Copy Share Image
A culture without mythology is not really a civilisation. — Vilayanur S. Ramachandran Copy Share Image
The boundary between neurology and psychiatry is becoming increasingly blurred, and its only a matter of time before psychiatry becomes just another branch of… — Vilayanur S. Ramachandran Copy Share Image
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… — Vilayanur S. Ramachandran Copy Share Image
Remember that politics, colonialism, imperialism and war also originate in the human brain. — Vilayanur S. Ramachandran Copy Share Image
The minute you succumb to outside pressure, you cease to be creative. — Vilayanur S. Ramachandran Copy Share Image
When I speak of artistic universals, I am not denying the enormous role played by culture. Obviously culture plays a tremendous role, otherwise you… — Vilayanur S. Ramachandran Copy Share Image
Great art allows you to transcend your mortal frame and to reach for the stars. I think great science does the same thing. — Vilayanur S. Ramachandran Copy Share Image
Lofty questions about the mind are fascinating to ask, philosophers have been asking them for three millennia both in India where I am from… — Vilayanur S. Ramachandran Copy Share Image
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… — Vilayanur S. Ramachandran Copy Share Image
