Vilayanur S. Ramachandran quotes

Vilayanur S. Ramachandran is an Indian neuroscientist renowned for his innovative research on the human brain. His work on phantom limbs and neurological syndromes has provided deep insights into brain function and consciousness. He continues to be an influential figure in neuroscience and popular science communication. Here are 42 of his quotes:

Any ape can reach for a banana, but only a human can reach for the stars or even know what that means.

Vilayanur S. Ramachandran

Your conscious life is an elaborate after-the-fact rationalization of things you really do for other reasons.

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 love, but that's part of the game.

Vilayanur S. Ramachandran

Our ability to perceive the world around us seems so effortless that we tend to take it for granted.

Vilayanur S. Ramachandran

Here is this mass of jelly - three pound mass of jelly - that 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 the meaning of infinity.

Vilayanur S. Ramachandran

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.

Vilayanur S. Ramachandran

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.

Vilayanur S. Ramachandran

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

Vilayanur S. Ramachandran

If we knew about the real facts and statistics of mortality, we'd be terrified.

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 am from and here in the West - but it is only in the brain that we can eventually hope to find the answers.

Vilayanur S. Ramachandran

A culture without mythology is not really a civilisation.

Vilayanur S. Ramachandran

The brain abhors discrepancies.

Vilayanur S. Ramachandran

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.

Vilayanur S. Ramachandran

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.

Vilayanur S. Ramachandran

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

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 dividing the sciences.

Vilayanur S. Ramachandran

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.

Vilayanur S. Ramachandran

science should be question driven, not methodology driven.

Vilayanur S. Ramachandran

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.

Vilayanur S. Ramachandran

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.

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 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.

Vilayanur S. Ramachandran