Vilayanur S. Ramachandran

The brain abhors discrepancies.

— Vilayanur S. Ramachandran

It may well be our brains are wired up to be slightly more optimistic than they should be.

— Vilayanur S. Ramachandran

If you're a thinking person, the liver is interesting, but nothing is more intriguing than the brain.

— Vilayanur S. Ramachandran

Even today no computer can understand language as well as a three-year-old or see as well as a mouse.

— Vilayanur S. Ramachandran

Without ducking responsibility, what's wrong with medicine today is that it is predicated on providing treatment, not on reducing suffering. Not on…

— Vilayanur S. Ramachandran

There is no real independent self, aloof from other human beings, inspecting the world, inspecting other people. You are, in fact, connected…

— Vilayanur S. Ramachandran

A culture without mythology is not really a civilisation.

— Vilayanur S. Ramachandran

The boundary between neurology and psychiatry is becoming increasingly blurred, and its only a matter of time before psychiatry becomes just another…

— Vilayanur S. Ramachandran

The visual system of the brain has the organization, computational profile, and architecture it has in order to facilitate the organism's thriving…

— Vilayanur S. Ramachandran

Remember that politics, colonialism, imperialism and war also originate in the human brain.

— Vilayanur S. Ramachandran

The minute you succumb to outside pressure, you cease to be creative.

— Vilayanur S. Ramachandran

When I speak of artistic universals, I am not denying the enormous role played by culture. Obviously culture plays a tremendous role,…

— Vilayanur S. Ramachandran

Great art allows you to transcend your mortal frame and to reach for the stars. I think great science does the same…

— Vilayanur S. Ramachandran

Lofty questions about the mind are fascinating to ask, philosophers have been asking them for three millennia both in India where I…

— Vilayanur S. Ramachandran

Here is this three-pound mass of jelly you can hold in the palm of your hand, and it can contemplate the vastness…

— Vilayanur S. Ramachandran

People think of art and science as being fundamentally opposed to each other, because art is about celebrating individual human creativity, and…

— Vilayanur S. Ramachandran

Think about what artists, novelists and poets have in common: the ability to engage in metaphorical thinking, linking seemingly unrelated ideas, such…

— Vilayanur S. Ramachandran

Science is like a love affair with nature; an elusive, tantalising mistress. It has all the turbulence, twists and turns of romantic…

— Vilayanur S. Ramachandran

My views as an individual ought not to be confused with my views as a scientist - the minute you try to…

— Vilayanur S. Ramachandran

My interests span biology, though sometimes I feel like an anachronism, somebody from the Victorian era when there weren't so many boundaries…

— Vilayanur S. Ramachandran

My mother was religious; she was knowledgeable about mythology and scriptures; she could tell the metaphysical nuances and make the story come…

— Vilayanur S. Ramachandran

A genius is somebody who seemingly just reaches out of nowhere.

— Vilayanur S. Ramachandran

There are 100 billion neurons in the adult human brain, and each neuron makes something like 1,000 to 10,000 contacts with other…

— Vilayanur S. Ramachandran

What the artist tries to do (either consciously or unconsciously) is to not only capture the essence of something but also to…

— Vilayanur S. Ramachandran

In the fetus, or a really young child, all the different brain areas are connected to each other, diffusely. And as the…

— Vilayanur S. Ramachandran