Vilayanur S. Ramachandran Quotes

A culture without mythology is not really a civilisation.

Ask, 'How are we different from the great apes?' We have culture, we have civilisation, and we have language to be celebrated as part of being human.

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

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.

Science is like a love affair with nature; an elusive, tantalising mistress. It has all the turbulence, twists and turns of romantic love, but that's part of the game.

If we knew about the real facts and statistics of mortality, we'd be terrified.

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.

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.

In fact, on one occasion, a rather pedantic experimental psychologist was telling him about a long, complicated experiment he had done, incorporating all the proper controls and using considerable technical virtuosity. When he saw Crick's exasperated expression he said, "but Dr. Crick, we have got it right - we know it's right," Crick's response was, "The point is not whether it's right. The point is: does it even matter whether its right or wrong?"

Remember that politics, colonialism, imperialism and war also originate in the human brain.

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

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.

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

If you're a thinking person, the liver is interesting, but nothing is more intriguing than the brain.

Great art allows you to transcend your mortal frame and to reach for the stars. I think great science does the same thing.

You can't 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.

Everyone knows that metaphors are important, yet we have no idea why.

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.'

My views as an individual ought not to be confused with my views as a scientist - the minute you try to mingle God and science, you get into trouble. Metaphysics has its place, and science has its place; don't mix the two.

If there is anything about your 'self' of which you can be sure, it is that it is anchored in your own body and yours alone. The person you experience as 'you' is here and now and nowhere else.

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.

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

When I speak of artistic universals, I am not denying the enormous role played by culture. Obviously culture plays a tremendous role, otherwise you wouldn't have different artistic styles - but it doesn't follow that art is completely idiosyncratic and arbitrary, either, or that there are no universal laws.

My interests span biology, though sometimes I feel like an anachronism, somebody from the Victorian era when there weren't so many boundaries dividing the sciences.

It may well be our brains are wired up to be slightly more optimistic than they should be.

The fact that hype exists doesn't prove that something is not important.

The minute you succumb to outside pressure, you cease to be creative.

The brain abhors discrepancies.