Vilayanur 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.
If we knew about the real facts and statistics of mortality, we’d be terrified.
Any ape can reach for a banana, but only humans can reach for the stars.
The minute you succumb to outside pressure, you cease to be creative.
The fact that hype exists doesn’t prove that something is not important.
The boundary between neurology and psychiatry is becoming increasingly blurred, and it’s only a matter of time before psychiatry becomes just another branch of neurology.
People think of art and science as being fundamentally opposed to each other, because art is about celebrating individual human creativity, and science is about discovering general principles, not about individual people. But in fact, the two have a lot in common, and the creative spirit is similar in both.
The brain abhors discrepancies.
When I speak of artistic universals, I am not denying the enormous role played by culture. Obviously culture plays a tremendous role, otherwise you wouldn’t have different artistic styles – but it doesn’t follow that art is completely idiosyncratic and arbitrary, either, or that there are no universal laws.
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.
What the artist tries to do (either consciously or unconsciously) is to not only capture the essence of something but also to amplify it in order to more powerfully activate the same neural mechanisms that would be activated by the original object.
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.
If you’re a thinking person, the liver is interesting, but nothing is more intriguing than the brain.
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 very vague about the exact meaning of words like “understand,” “think,” and indeed the word “meaning” itself.
You need to have tremendous confidence in your work, even a touch of arrogance, chutzpah. Many very fine researchers lack intellectual daring. It’s human nature to want to be cozy, secure. But that can be a cul de sac.
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.
If we knew about the real facts and statistics of mortality, we’d be terrified.
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.
My views as an individual ought not to be confused with my views as a scientist – the minute you try to mingle God and science, you get into trouble. Metaphysics has its place, and science has its place; don’t mix the two.
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.
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.
A culture without mythology is not really a civilisation.
Science is like a love affair with nature; an elusive, tantalising mistress. It has all the turbulence, twists and turns of romantic love, but that’s part of the game.
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.
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.
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 predicament to be in, if you think about it.
If there is anything about your ‘self’ of which you can be sure, it is that it is anchored in your own body and yours alone. The person you experience as ‘you’ is here and now and nowhere else.
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.
My mother was religious; she was knowledgeable about mythology and scriptures; she could tell the metaphysical nuances and make the story come to life with their deeper significance. The current generation is missing out on this.
Even today no computer can understand language as well as a three-year-old or see as well as a mouse.
Remember that politics, colonialism, imperialism and war also originate in the human brain.
The adage that fact is stranger than fiction seems to be especially true for the workings of the brain.
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 Facebook and Internet, you’re actually quite literally connected by your neurons.
You can’t 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.
I was socially isolated as a kid. I had friends, but I wasn’t very good at sports and that sort of thing so I became quite comfortable being by myself, exploring. The world was my private playground, and in it, I was supreme. Darwin, Faraday, Huxley and other great scientists were my companions.
