Words matter. These are the best Vilayanur S. Ramachandran Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
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.
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.
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.
The minute you succumb to outside pressure, you cease to be creative.
The adage that fact is stranger than fiction seems to be especially true for the workings of the brain.
If you’re a thinking person, the liver is interesting, but nothing is more intriguing than the brain.
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.
Everyone knows that metaphors are important, yet we have no idea why.
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.
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 fact that hype exists doesn’t prove that something is not important.
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.
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.
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.
If we knew about the real facts and statistics of mortality, we’d be terrified.
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.
