Vilayanur S. Ramachandran Quotes

26 quotes in 515 categories

• Your conscious life is an elaborate after-the-fact rationalization of things you really do for other reasons.
• 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…
• A culture without mythology is not really a civilisation.
• 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…
• Here is a neuron that fires when I reach and grab something, but it also fires when I watch Joe reaching and grabbing something. ...…
• 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.…
• There is no real independent self, aloof from other human beings, inspecting the world, inspecting other people. You are, in fact, connected not just via…
• 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 minute you succumb to outside pressure, you cease to be creative.
• 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…
• The brain abhors discrepancies.
• 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…
• If you're a thinking person, the liver is interesting, but nothing is more intriguing than the brain.
• 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…
• One of the first things we teach medical students is to listen to the patient by taking a careful medical history. Ninety percent of the…
• Even though its common knowledge these days, it never ceases to amaze me that all the richness of our mental life - all our feelings,…
• Any ape can reach for a banana, but only humans can reach for the stars.
• Indeed, the line between perceiving and hallucinating is not as crisp as we like to think. In a sense, when we look at the world,…
• Self-awareness is a trait that not only makes us human but also paradoxically makes us want to be more than merely human. As I said…
• What do we mean by "knowledge" or "understanding"? And how do billions of neurons achieve them? These are complete mysteries. Admittedly, cognitive neuroscientists are still…

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