Quotes from V.S. Ramachandran

So here is the greatest irony of all: that the self that almost by definition is entirely private is to significant extent a social construct.

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).

The law of perceptual problem solving, or peekaboo, should now make more sense. It may have evolved to ensure that the search for visual solutions is inherently pleasurable rather than frustrating, so that you don't give up too easily.

All good science emerges from an imaginative conception of what might be true.

How does language interact with thought? Does language enable us to think, or does thinking enable us to talk?

No engineer would have dreamed of such an inelegant solution, which goes to illustrate the opportunistic nature of evolution. (As Francis Crick once said, 'God is a hacker, not an engineer.')

Homogeneity breeds weakness: theoretical blind spots, stale paradigms, an echo-chamber mentality, and cults of personality.

How does language interact with thought? Does language enable us to think, or does thinking enable us to talk? Can we think in a sophisticated manner without silent internal speech? And lastly, how did this extraordinarily complex, multicomponent system originally come into existence in our hominin ancestors?

It's as if each of us is hallucinating all the time and what we call perception involves merely selecting the one hallucination that best matches the current input.

Indeed, one could go so far as to say that humor helps as an effective antidote against a useless struggle against the ultimate danger: the ever-present fear of death in self-conscious beings like us.

Getting trapped in narrow cul-de-sac specializations and "clubs" whose membership is open only to those who congratulate and fund each other is an occupational hazard in modern science