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

Vilayanur S. Ramachandran

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Vilayanur S. Ramachandran
Age: 73
Born: 1951
Born: August 10
Academic
Neurologist
Pedagogue
Psychologist
Scientist
Writer
Rykove
V. S. Ramachandran
V S Ramachandran
Reason
Really
Things
Rationalization
Life
Elaborate
Reasons
Conscious
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Facts

More quotes by Vilayanur S. Ramachandran

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Any ape can reach for a banana, but only humans can reach for the stars.
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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.
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Great art allows you to transcend your mortal frame and to reach for the stars. I think great science does the same thing.
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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).
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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.
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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
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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
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A genius is somebody who seemingly just reaches out of nowhere.
Vilayanur S. Ramachandran
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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.
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The adage that fact is stranger than fiction seems to be especially true for the workings of the brain.
Vilayanur S. Ramachandran
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If we knew about the real facts and statistics of mortality, we’d be terrified.
Vilayanur S. Ramachandran
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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
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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.
Vilayanur S. Ramachandran
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If you're a thinking person, the liver is interesting, but nothing is more intriguing than the brain.
Vilayanur S. Ramachandran
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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.
Vilayanur S. Ramachandran
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The minute you succumb to outside pressure, you cease to be creative.
Vilayanur S. Ramachandran
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The brain abhors discrepancies.
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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
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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
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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.
Vilayanur S. Ramachandran