Famous Quotes & Sayings

V.S. Ramachandran Quotes & Sayings

Enjoy the top 18 famous quotes, sayings and quotations by V.S. Ramachandran.

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Famous Quotes By V.S. Ramachandran

V.S. Ramachandran Quotes 994964

The TELL-TALE BRAIN A Neuroscientist's Quest for What Makes Us Human V. S. RAMACHANDRAN — V.S. Ramachandran

V.S. Ramachandran Quotes 2184623

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. — V.S. Ramachandran

V.S. Ramachandran Quotes 1418163

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 in my BBC Reith Lectures, Science tells us we are merely beasts, but we don't feel like that. We feel like angels trapped inside the bodies of beasts, forever craving transcendence — V.S. Ramachandran

V.S. Ramachandran Quotes 275862

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, we are hallucinating all the time. One could almost regard perception as the act of choosing the one hallucination that best fits the incoming data. — V.S. Ramachandran

V.S. Ramachandran Quotes 1542880

Any ape can reach for a banana, but only humans can reach for the stars. — V.S. Ramachandran

V.S. Ramachandran Quotes 2128439

How can a three-pound mass of jelly that you can hold in your palm imagine angels, contemplate the meaning of infinity, and even question its own place in the cosmos? Especially awe inspiring is the fact that any single brain, including yours, is made up of atoms that were forged in the hearts of countless, far-flung stars billions of years ago. These particles drifted for eons and light-years until gravity and change brought them together here, now. These atoms now form a conglomerate- your brain- that can not only ponder the very stars that gave it birth but can also think about its own ability to think and wonder about its own ability to wonder. 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. — V.S. Ramachandran

V.S. Ramachandran Quotes 1796459

Even though its common knowledge these days, it never ceases to amaze me that all the richness of our mental life - all our feelings, our emotions, our thoughts, our ambitions, our love life, our religious sentiments and even what each of us regards us his own intimate private self - is simply the activity of these little specks of jelly in your head, in your brain. There is nothing else. — V.S. Ramachandran

V.S. Ramachandran Quotes 2232841

Art can be thought of as a form of visual foreplay before the climax. — V.S. Ramachandran

V.S. Ramachandran Quotes 1339528

How does language interact with thought? Does language enable us to think, or does thinking enable us to talk? Can we think in a sophisticated manner without silent internal speech? And lastly, how did this extraordinarily complex, multicomponent system originally come into existence in our hominin ancestors? — V.S. Ramachandran

V.S. Ramachandran Quotes 1322721

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 the brain and the cosmos that it creates. — V.S. Ramachandran

V.S. Ramachandran Quotes 1356362

The law of perceptual problem solving, or peekaboo, should now make more sense. It may have evolved to ensure that the search for visual solutions is inherently pleasurable rather than frustrating, so that you don't give up too easily. — V.S. Ramachandran

V.S. Ramachandran Quotes 1196066

The human brain, it has been said, is the most complexly organised structure in the universe and to appreciate this you just have to look at some numbers. The brain is made up of one hundred billion nerve cells or "neurons" which is the basic structural and functional units of the nervous system. Each neuron makes something like a thousand to ten thousand contacts with other neurons and these points of contact are called synapses where exchange of information occurs. And based on this information, someone has calculated that the number of possible permutations and combinations of brain activity, in other words the numbers of brain states, exceeds the number of elementary particles in the known universe. — V.S. Ramachandran

V.S. Ramachandran Quotes 234202

I learned an important lesson: Never take the obvious for granted. Once upon a time, it was so obvious that a four-pound rock would plummet earthward twice as fast as a two-pound rock that no one ever bothered to test it. That is, until Galileo Galilei came along and took ten minutes to perform an elegantly simple experiment that yielded a counterintuitive result and changed the course of history. — V.S. Ramachandran

V.S. Ramachandran Quotes 1677132

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 time, you can arrive at an uncannily accurate diagnosis by paying close attention, using physical examination and sophisticated lab test to confirm your hunch (and to increase the bill to the insurance company). — V.S. Ramachandran

V.S. Ramachandran Quotes 1913059

Science should be question driven, not methodology driven. — V.S. Ramachandran

V.S. Ramachandran Quotes 1929087

He had the arrogance of the believer, but none of the humility of the deeply religious. — V.S. Ramachandran

V.S. Ramachandran Quotes 2157980

Once the propagation mechanism was in place, it would have exerted selective pressure to make some outliers in the population more innovative. This is because innovations would only be valuable if they spread rapidly. In this respect, we could say mirror neurons served the same role in early hominin evolution as the Internet, Wikipedia, and blogging do today. Once the cascade was set in motion, there was no turning back from the path to humanity. — V.S. Ramachandran

V.S. Ramachandran Quotes 284837

The purpose of all of this (left hemisphere's way of choosing denial or repression over considering an anomaly) is to impose stability on behavior and to prevent vacillation because indecisiveness doesn't serve any purpose. Any decision, so long as it is probably correct, is better than no decision at all. A perpetually fickle general will never win a war. — V.S. Ramachandran