Quote

Any ape can reach for a banana, but only humans can reach for the stars.

Vilayanur S. Ramachandran

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Vilayanur S. Ramachandran
Age: 73
Born: 1951
Born: August 10
Academic
Neurologist
Pedagogue
Psychologist
Scientist
Writer
Rykove
V. S. Ramachandran
V S Ramachandran
Humans
Banana
Bananas
Apes
Reach
Stars

More quotes by Vilayanur S. Ramachandran

Image
Curiosity illuminates the correct path to anything in life. If you're not curious, that's when your brain is starting to die.
Vilayanur S. Ramachandran
Image
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.
Vilayanur S. Ramachandran
Image
Our ability to perceive the world around us seems so effortless that we tend to take it for granted.
Vilayanur S. Ramachandran
Image
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).
Vilayanur S. Ramachandran
Image
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.
Vilayanur S. Ramachandran
Image
Great art allows you to transcend your mortal frame and to reach for the stars. I think great science does the same thing.
Vilayanur S. Ramachandran
Image
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.
Vilayanur S. Ramachandran
Image
In the fetus, or a really young child, all the different brain areas are connected to each other, diffusely. And as the brain develops, the excess connections are turned off, so you get very specialized areas. So most people have really specialized talents. What happens in creative people is this pooling doesn't take place.
Vilayanur S. Ramachandran
Image
Even today no computer can understand language as well as a three-year-old or see as well as a mouse.
Vilayanur S. Ramachandran
Image
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.
Vilayanur S. Ramachandran
Image
The brain abhors discrepancies.
Vilayanur S. Ramachandran
Image
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
Image
The adage that fact is stranger than fiction seems to be especially true for the workings of the brain.
Vilayanur S. Ramachandran
Image
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 part of the game.
Vilayanur S. Ramachandran
Image
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.
Vilayanur S. Ramachandran
Image
Your conscious life is an elaborate after-the-fact rationalization of things you really do for other reasons.
Vilayanur S. Ramachandran
Image
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.
Vilayanur S. Ramachandran
Image
A genius is somebody who seemingly just reaches out of nowhere.
Vilayanur S. Ramachandran
Image
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
Vilayanur S. Ramachandran
Image
A culture without mythology is not really a civilisation.
Vilayanur S. Ramachandran