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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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Vilayanur S. Ramachandran
Age: 73
Born: 1951
Born: August 10
Academic
Neurologist
Pedagogue
Psychologist
Scientist
Writer
Rykove
V. S. Ramachandran
V S Ramachandran
Responsibility
Ducking
Suffering
Predicated
Wrong
Solving
Problem
Reducing
Today
Providing
Without
Treatment
Medicine
Problems
More quotes by Vilayanur S. Ramachandran
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
Even today no computer can understand language as well as a three-year-old or see as well as a mouse.
Vilayanur S. Ramachandran
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
A genius is somebody who seemingly just reaches out of nowhere.
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
If we knew about the real facts and statistics of mortality, we’d be terrified.
Vilayanur S. Ramachandran
The visual system of the brain has the organization, computational profile, and architecture it has in order to facilitate the organism's thriving at the four Fs: feeding fleeing, fighting, and reproduction.
Vilayanur S. Ramachandran
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
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
Any ape can reach for a banana, but only humans can reach for the stars.
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
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
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
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
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
The minute you succumb to outside pressure, you cease to be creative.
Vilayanur S. Ramachandran
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
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
Remember that politics, colonialism, imperialism and war also originate in the human brain.
Vilayanur S. Ramachandran
The brain abhors discrepancies.
Vilayanur S. Ramachandran
