Quote

You cant 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

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
Image
Call
Art
Come
Randomly
Take
Distort
Many
Cant
People
Precisely
Although

More quotes by 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
Here is this three-pound mass of jelly 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 on the meaning of infinity.
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
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.
Vilayanur S. Ramachandran
Image
A genius is somebody who seemingly just reaches out of nowhere.
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
Think about what artists, novelists and poets have in common: the ability to engage in metaphorical thinking, linking seemingly unrelated ideas, such as, 'It is the east, and Juliet is the Sun.'
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
Any ape can reach for a banana, but only humans can reach for the stars.
Vilayanur S. Ramachandran
Image
There are 100 billion neurons in the adult human brain, and each neuron makes something like 1,000 to 10,000 contacts with other neurons in the brain. Based on this, people have calculated that the number of permutations and combinations of brain activity exceeds the number of elementary particles in the universe.
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
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
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
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
Image
Remember that politics, colonialism, imperialism and war also originate in the human brain.
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
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
A culture without mythology is not really a civilisation.
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 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