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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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Vilayanur S. Ramachandran
Age: 73
Born: 1951
Born: August 10
Academic
Neurologist
Pedagogue
Psychologist
Scientist
Writer
Rykove
V. S. Ramachandran
V S Ramachandran
Mortality
Terrified
Statistics
Knew
Facts
Real

More quotes by 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 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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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
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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.
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.
Vilayanur S. Ramachandran
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A culture without mythology is not really a civilisation.
Vilayanur S. Ramachandran
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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
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Remember that politics, colonialism, imperialism and war also originate in the human brain.
Vilayanur S. Ramachandran
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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
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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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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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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
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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
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Any ape can reach for a banana, but only humans can reach for the stars.
Vilayanur S. Ramachandran
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Here is a neuron that fires when I reach and grab something, but it also fires when I watch Joe reaching and grabbing something. ... It's as though this neuron is adopting the other person's point of view.
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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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
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Our ability to perceive the world around us seems so effortless that we tend to take it for granted.
Vilayanur S. Ramachandran
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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
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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