Quotes from Vilayanur S. Ramachandran

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

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.

I was socially isolated as a kid. I had friends, but I wasn't very good at sports and that sort of thing so I became quite comfortable being by myself, exploring. The world was my private playground, and in it, I was supreme. Darwin, Faraday, Huxley and other great scientists were my companions.

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.

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

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

Lofty questions about the mind are fascinating to ask, philosophers have been asking them for three millennia both in India where I am from and here in the West - but it is only in the brain that we can eventually hope to find the answers.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

My mother was religious; she was knowledgeable about mythology and scriptures; she could tell the metaphysical nuances and make the story come to life with their deeper significance. The current generation is missing out on this.

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

You need to have tremendous confidence in your work, even a touch of arrogance, chutzpah. Many very fine researchers lack intellectual daring. It's human nature to want to be cozy, secure. But that can be a cul de sac.

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.

A culture without mythology is not really a civilisation.

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

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.

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

You cant 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.