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IMPROVING LIVES BY IMPROVING BRAINS

A remarkable story

of self discovery that will transform your

thinking about living with disability and what could and should be done about it.

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Vilayanur S. Ramachandran
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Vilayanur Subramanian Ramachandran is an Indian-American neuroscientist. Ramachandran is known for his wide-ranging experiments and theories in behavioral neurology, including the invention of the mirror box. He is a Distinguished Professor in UCSD's Department of Psychology, where he is the director of the Center for Brain and Cognition.

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.
- V. S. Ramachandran

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. - V. S. Ramachandran

Curiosity illuminates the correct path to anything in life. If you're not curious, that's when your brain is starting to die. - V. 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. - V. S. Ramachandran

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

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. - V. S. Ramachandran

Even though its common knowledge these days, it never ceases to amaze me that all the richness of our mental life - all our feelings, our emotions, our thoughts, our ambitions, our love life, our religious sentiments and even what each of us regards us his own intimate private self - is simply the activity of these little specks of jelly in your head, in your brain. There is nothing else. - V. S. Ramachandran

Even though its common knowledge these days, it never ceases to amaze me that all the richness of our mental life - all our feelings, our emotions, our thoughts, our ambitions, our love life, our religious sentiments and even what each of us regards us his own intimate private self - is simply the activity of these little specks of jelly in your head, in your brain. There is nothing else. - V. S. Ramachandran

The minute you succumb to outside pressure, you cease to be creative. - V. 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. - V. S. Ramachandran

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. - V. 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. - V. S. Ramachandran

Our ability to perceive the world around us seems so effortless that we tend to take it for granted. - V. S. Ramachandran

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. - V. 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. - V. S. Ramachandran

Any ape can reach for a banana, but only humans can reach for the stars. - V. 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. - V. S. Ramachandran

Even today no computer can understand language as well as a three-year-old or see as well as a mouse. - V. S. Ramachandran

Remember that politics, colonialism, imperialism and war also originate in the human brain.
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. - V. S. Ramachandran

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. - V. S. Ramachandran

The brain abhors discrepancies. - V. S. Ramachandran

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.
- V. S. Ramachandran

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. - V. S. Ramachandran

Curiosity illuminates the correct path to anything in life. If you're not curious, that's when your brain is starting to die. - V. 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. - V. S. Ramachandran

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

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. - V. S. Ramachandran

Even though its common knowledge these days, it never ceases to amaze me that all the richness of our mental life - all our feelings, our emotions, our thoughts, our ambitions, our love life, our religious sentiments and even what each of us regards us his own intimate private self - is simply the activity of these little specks of jelly in your head, in your brain. There is nothing else. - V. S. Ramachandran

Even though its common knowledge these days, it never ceases to amaze me that all the richness of our mental life - all our feelings, our emotions, our thoughts, our ambitions, our love life, our religious sentiments and even what each of us regards us his own intimate private self - is simply the activity of these little specks of jelly in your head, in your brain. There is nothing else. - V. S. Ramachandran

The minute you succumb to outside pressure, you cease to be creative. - V. 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. - V. S. Ramachandran

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. - V. 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. - V. S. Ramachandran

Our ability to perceive the world around us seems so effortless that we tend to take it for granted. - V. S. Ramachandran

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. - V. 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. - V. S. Ramachandran

Any ape can reach for a banana, but only humans can reach for the stars. - V. 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. - V. S. Ramachandran

Even today no computer can understand language as well as a three-year-old or see as well as a mouse. - V. S. Ramachandran

Remember that politics, colonialism, imperialism and war also originate in the human brain.
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. - V. S. Ramachandran

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. - V. S. Ramachandran

The brain abhors discrepancies. - V. S. Ramachandran

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