Quotes from V.S. Ramachandran

He had the arrogance of the believer, but none of the humility of the deeply religious.

Art can be thought of as a form of visual foreplay before the climax.

But in biological systems there is a deep unity between structure, function, and origin. You cannot make very much progress understanding any one of these unless you are also paying close attention to the other two.

So the quest for biological laws shouldn't be driven by a quest for simplicity or elegance. No woman who has been through labor would say that it's an elegant solution to giving birth to a baby.

adage that fact is stranger than fiction seems to be especially true for the workings of the brain.

once the propagation mechanism was in place, it would have exerted selective pressure to make some outliers in the population more innovative. This is because innovations would only be valuable if they spread rapidly. In this respect, we could say mirror neurons served the same role in early hominin evolution as the Internet, Wikipedia, and blogging do today. Once the cascade was set in motion, there was no turning back from the path to humanity.

With the arrival of humans, it has been said, the universe has suddenly become conscious of itself. This, truly, is the greatest mystery of all.

The TELL-TALE BRAIN A Neuroscientist's Quest for What Makes Us Human V. S. RAMACHANDRAN

Stephen Jay Gould

TWO TOPICS IN brain research always seem to attract geniuses and crackpots. One is consciousness and the other is the question of how language evolved.

He emphasized the huge gap between the mental abilities of apes and humans and pointed out (mistakenly) that the human brain had a unique anatomical structure called the 'hippocampus minor', which he said was entirely absent in apes.

ancestors, perhaps as friends, perhaps as foes—we do not know. Nor again do we know why they vanished, although given our species' dismal record as responsible stewards of nature, it's a decent bet that we drove them to extinction.

One theory holds that the CIA has spotted them already but the information is being withheld until it is ruled out that they are hoarding weapons of mass destruction like blowpipes.)

Laughter is nature's ok signal.

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.

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

He had the arrogance of the believer, but none of the humility of the deeply religious.

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.

Yet as human beings we have to accept-with humility-that the question of ultimate origins will always remain with us, no matter how deeply we understand the brain and the cosmos that it creates.

science should be question driven, not methodology driven.

Any ape can reach for a banana, but only humans can reach for the stars.

I learned an important lesson: Never take the obvious for granted. Once upon a time, it was so obvious that a four-pound rock would plummet earthward twice as fast as a two-pound rock that no one ever bothered to test it. That is, until Galileo Galilei came along and took ten minutes to perform an elegantly simple experiment that yielded a counterintuitive result and changed the course of history.

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.

The purpose of all of this (left hemisphere's way of choosing denial or repression over considering an anomaly) is to impose stability on behavior and to prevent vacillation because indecisiveness doesn't serve any purpose. Any decision, so long as it is probably correct, is better than no decision at all. A perpetually fickle general will never win a war.