Vilayanur S. Ramachandran
Vilayanur S. Ramachandran
Vilayanur Subramanian Ramachandran is an Indian-American neuroscientist. He is known for his experiments and theories in behavioral neurology, including the invention of the mirror box. Ramachandran is a distinguished professor in UCSD's Department of Psychology, where he is the director of the Center for Brain and Cognition.
"Here is this mass of jelly - three pound mass of jelly - that 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 the meaning of infinity."
"What neurology tells us is that the self consists of many components, and the notion of one unitary self may well be an illusion."
"Any ape can reach for a banana, but only a human can reach for the stars or even know what that means."
"Whether a country is to be called civilised or not, depends not on how affluent the upper 10 per cent are, but how well they treat the lower 10 per cent."
"Your "conscious life" is an elaborate after-the-fact rationalization of things you really do for other reasons."
"Science tells us we are merely beasts, but we dont feel like that. We feel like angels trapped inside the bodies of beasts, forever craving transcendence."
