Top 50 Vilayanur Ramachandran Quotes
Vilayanur Ramachandran is an Indian neurologist born during the year 1951., commonly known for his work in the fields of behavioral neurology and psychophysics.
Currently he is one of the most influential neurologists in the world and has high positions in universities and institutes around the world. Some of his most notable works are: "Ghosts in the Brain", "The emerging mind" or "The man with the phantom twin: adventures in the neuroscience of the human brain", the latter being widely read today.
- It may interest you: "Steven Pinker's 30 Best Famous Quotes"
Vilayanur Ramachandran famous quotes and phrases
A man with a simply impressive professional career, winner of several international awards. Ramachandran is a benchmark in the field of neurology and biology that we should all know about.
Do you want to know a little more about him and about his work? Below you can enjoy the 50 best phrases of Vilayanur Ramachandran, one of the most notable scientists of the current 21st century.
1. In fact, the line between perception and hallucinations is not as sharp as we like to think. In a sense, when we look at the world, we are hallucinating all the time. One could almost consider perception as the act of choosing the hallucination that best fits the input data.
The line that separates reality from hallucinations can be, on certain occasions, difficult to perceive.
2. Our ability to perceive the world around us seems so easy that we tend to take it for granted.
Many times we are not fully aware of the dangers we run, we should all be a little more cautious.
3. Consider what artists, novelists, and poets have in common: the ability to use metaphorical thinking, linking seemingly unrelated ideas.
In order to create art we must have a great imagination, metaphorical thinking would be a way of seeing this inner world.
4. How are we different from the great apes? We have culture, we have civilization, and we have the language and everything comes from the human being.
The reason is what separates us from the rest of the hominids, without it we would just be another species of large apes.
5. What neurology tells us is that the "self" consists of many components, and the notion of a unitary "self" may well be an illusion.
Thanks to the neurology From behavior we can explain certain things, which long ago had no apparent explanation.
6. People often ask how I got interested in the brain; my answer is: How can anyone NOT be interested in it? Everything we call human nature and consciousness arises from there.
The brain is the most complex organ that the human being possesses, at present we still do not know a large part of its functions.
7. The boundary between neurology and psychiatry is becoming increasingly blurred, and it is only a matter of time before psychiatry becomes just another branch of neurology.
Neurology as a science is beginning to absorb other types of studies, such as psychiatry. It is certainly a really interesting science.
8. The art can be thought of as a form of visual foreplay before the climax.
Art can lead us to experience a large number of emotions and thoughts. Artists of all ages have always given us great experiences.
9. A genius is someone who seems to come out of nowhere.
Where does a genius come from? This is something that certainly no one knows about. Geniuses appear out of nowhere and amaze us with their capabilities.
10. With the arrival of humans, it has been said, the universe has suddenly become self-aware. This, truly, is the greatest mystery of all.
Human beings demonstrate self-awareness, this is something that not all species in the animal world have been able to demonstrate.
11. Remember that politics, colonialism, imperialism and war also originate in the human brain.
The worst aspects of the human being are also given by our brain. It seems that the more intelligence a being has, it will also have a greater evil.
12. There is no real independent "me", distant from other human beings, inspecting the world and inspecting other people. In fact, you are connected not only through Facebook and the Internet, you are actually connected literally by your neurons.
How we develop in society and with those around us largely determines our way of being.
13. Great art allows you to transcend your mortal frame and reach for the stars. I think big science does the same.
A great quote from Ramachandran, where he exposes us his particular point of view, whereby art and science are indeed very similar.
14. It is as if each one of us is hallucinating all the time and what we call perception simply implies a selection of the hallucination that best suits the input of our stream.
As human beings we are limited to our own perception, many aspects that surround us are simply ignored by our perception.
15. We are not angels, we are just sophisticated apes. Yet we feel like angels trapped inside the bodies of beasts, yearning for transcendence and all. time trying to spread our wings and fly, and it's really a very strange situation to be in, if you think about it.
We should not believe ourselves superior to the rest of the animal world, because we are only a species that has achieved a greater development of its intelligence.
16. Science is like a love affair with nature, an elusive, seductive mistress. It has all the turbulence and twists and turns of romantic love, but that's part of the game.
Science tries to understand absolutely everything about nature that surrounds us. Science is one of the best weapons that human beings have for their development.
17. Your conscious life is an elaborate rationalization after the things you actually do for other reasons.
Our brain orders our life in a certain way so that it is easy for us and possible to understand it, this is always a dramatization of reality.
18. A culture without mythology is not really a civilization.
Mythology has always tried to explain those things that at that time had no explanation.
19. Any ape can reach for a banana, but only human beings can reach for the stars.
Human beings have revealed ourselves as the most intelligent and wonderful being on planet earth.
20. If you are a thinking person, the liver is interesting, but there is nothing more fascinating than the brain.
The brain is indeed a fascinating organ, a miniature universe inside our heads.
21. However, as human beings, we have to accept, with humility, that the question of the ultimate origin It will always stay with us, no matter how deeply we think we understand the brain and the brain. cosmos.
We must know how to accept that we will never have absolute knowledge of the universe, this is something that as human beings is biologically impossible.
22. The human brain, it has been said, is the most complexly organized structure in the universe and to appreciate it you only have to look at some numbers. The brain is made up of one hundred billion nerve cells, or neurons, which are the basic structural and functional units of the nervous system. Each neuron makes something like 1,000 to 10,000 contacts with other neurons, and these contact points are called synapses, which is where the exchange of information occurs. And based on this information, someone has calculated that the number of possible permutations and combinations of the activity brain, that is, the number of states of the brain, is greater than the number of elementary particles in the universe acquaintance.
The human being is an exceptional biological machine, with such a complexity that it escapes our own knowledge.
23. Curiosity lights the right path to anything in life. If you're not curious, that's when your brain is starting to die.
Curiosity is the cause of the technological evolution of the human being, with it we learned to master fire and we will be able to travel to Mars in the future.
24. Here with this jelly dough (only three pounds of jelly dough) that you could hold in the palm of your hand, you can contemplate the immensity of the interstellar space, you can contemplate the meaning of infinity and you can contemplate yourself contemplating the meaning of the infinite.
The brain, despite its small size, is capable of opening the doors to knowledge, without a doubt it is a work of art of biology.
25. Self-awareness is a trait that not only makes us human but, paradoxically, makes us want to be more than human. As I have said in my BBC Reith lectures, Science tells us we are merely beasts, but we don't feel that way. We feel like angels trapped inside the bodies of animals, yearning for transcendence.
The human being has always wanted to improve as an individual, something totally necessary to be able to reach our place in the stars.
26. The common denominator of all jokes is a path of hope that is diverted by an unexpected turn that requires a complete reinterpretation of all previous events - the punch... Reinterpretation alone is not enough. The new model must be unquestionable. For example, a gentleman walking towards the car falls on a banana skin and falls. If he cracks his head and bleeds, obviously, you won't come out laughing. You will address the phone and call an ambulance. But if he just wipes the face off the face, he looks around and then stands up, starts laughing. The reason is that, I suggest, because he now knows beyond question, no real harm has been done. I would argue that laughter is nature's way of signaling that "it's a false alarm." Why is this evolutionary point of view useful? It suggests that the rhythmic sound of the staking of laughter evolved to inform our relatives who share our genes; don't waste your precious resources in this situation; it's a false alarm.
Human communication is totally different from that of other animals, this communication has allowed us to evolve as a species.
27. He had the arrogance of the believer, but also the humility of the deeply religious.
We must be clear about our personal values, with them we will be able to achieve our goal.
28. Although its common knowledge today, it never ceases to amaze me at all the richness of our mental life, all our feelings, our emotions, our thoughts, our ambitions, our love life, our religious feelings and even the fact that each one of us us. considers us our own intimate "private self", it is simply the activity of these little species of jelly in the head, the brain. There is nothing else.
The brain makes up everything we are as a person, our brain is us.
29. It's hard to overcome the importance of understanding mirror neurons and their function. They may be central to social learning, imitation, and the cultural transmission of skills and attitudes, perhaps even the pressured sound groups we call words. By developing a mirror neuron system, effective evolution turned culture into the new genome. Armed with culture, humans could adapt to new hostile environments and figure out how to exploit previously inaccessible or poisonous food sources. in one or two generations, rather than the hundreds or thousands of generations it would have taken to achieve these transformations through evolution genetics.
Ramachandran effectively delved into the theory of mirror neurons and how biology can greatly affect the development of our civilization.
30. Thus, culture became a new source of significant evolutionary pressure, which helped selecting brains that had even better mirror neuron systems and imitative learning associated with them. The result was one of many self-amplifying snowball effects culminating in Homo Sapiens, the hominid who looked into his own mind and saw the entire cosmos reflected in his inside.
With the development of Homo Sapiens, human evolution managed to reach the human being that we are today.
31. What do we mean by knowledge or understanding? And how do you get billions of neurons? These are complete mysteries. Of course, cognitive neuroscientists are still very confused about the exact meaning of words like “understand”, “think” and, indeed, the word meaning itself.
How the human being develops his own intellect is something that even today completely escapes us.
32. One of the first things we teach medical students is to listen to the patient through careful history taking. Ninety percent of the time, you can arrive at an accurate diagnosis in a not-so-accurate way by special attention, using a physical examination and a sophisticated laboratory test to confirm its suspicious of her.
Current technology allows us to reach great conclusions, quickly and easily.
33. Science should be driven by questions, not methodology.
Science should always be the answer to a big question.
34. The purpose of all this (the way to choose denial or left-brain repression to consider a anomaly) is to impose stability on behavior and avoid vacillation that indecision serves no purpose purpose. Any decision, as long as it is probably correct, is better than no decision. A perpetually skinny general, he will never win a war.
Our decisions will take us to the place where we should be, our actions represent us.
35. The law of perceptual problem solving or Peekaboo should now make more sense. It may have evolved to ensure that visual solution-seeking is inherently pleasurable and not frustrating, so they don't give up too easily.
Ramachandran's works are widely studied today, delving into neuroscience, always seeking to answer big questions.
36. I found mysteries and possibilities everywhere.
There will always be new areas to explore or big questions to answer.
37. I found myself drawn to biology, with all its frustrating yet fascinating complexities.
Biology is, without a doubt, one of the most exciting sciences, being able to answer the questions that it poses to us is obviously not an easy task.
38. I learned an important lesson: never take anything for granted.
A great lesson that we should all learn from this great scientist, nothing is completely true until we make sure of it.
39. All good science springs from an imaginative conception of what might be true.
The sciences are the fruit of our imagination, without it we could never have managed to develop it minimally.
40. Here is the biggest irony: that the "me" that is almost by definition completely private is, to a large extent, a social construction.
The society we live in largely determines the person we are today.
41. How does language interact with thought? Does language allow us to think, or does thought allow us to speak?
A really difficult question to answer, which came first, the chicken or the egg?
42. No engineer would have dreamed of a solution so inelegant that it illustrates the opportunistic nature of evolution. (As Francis Crick once said, "God is a hacker, not an engineer.")
Biology is a really exciting science, many of us perhaps should study it further.
43. For all their superficial diversity, most jokes and amusing incidents have the following logical structure: You typically lead the listener down a garden path of hope, slowly increasing the strain. In the end, introduce an unexpected twist that entails a complete reinterpretation of all the previous data and, in addition, it is critical that the new interpretation, even if totally unexpected, makes as much sense of the whole set of facts as the interpretation originally did expected.
The human being is the only animal that supposedly has a sense of humor, a distinctive feature that separates us from other animal species.
44. In fact, it can be said that humor helps as an effective antidote against a futile fight against the final danger: the fear of death felt by self-conscious beings like us.
Humor helps us fight against the most difficult situations; this is undoubtedly a great support in all our lives.
45. Once the propagation mechanism was in place, it would have exerted selective pressure to make some innovative settlers out of the population. This is because innovations would only be valuable if they spread quickly. In this sense, we could say that mirror neurons played the same role in the initial evolution of Hominin as the Internet, Wikipedia and blocks do today. Once the waterfall got going, it did not turn to the path of humanity.
Thanks to new technologies we can assimilate knowledge in a much more accurate way, in the antiquity biology may have occupied this prominent place in the development of the species human.
46. Homogeneity breeds weakness: theoretical blind spots, outdated paradigms, eco-camera mentality, and personality cults.
Living all in the same society and by the same rules, can also be something that deprives us of being able to evolve as individuals.
47. Thus, the search for biological laws should not be driven by a search for simplicity or elegance. No woman who has given birth would say that it is an elegant solution to deliver a baby.
Biology always looks for the best option, be it more pleasant or be it more unfortunate for the species that experiences it.
48. Getting locked into narrow specializations and clubs, which are only open to those who congratulate and fund them, are an occupational hazard in modern science.
We must not be swayed by third party flattery or empty promises, we must be the scientists that we really are.
49. The ancestors, perhaps as friends, perhaps as enemies... we do not know. It's also not known why they faded away, though, since our unsavory record as responsible stewards of nature, it's a decent bet to say we take them to the extinction.
The hominid species that preceded us were undoubtedly the cause of our being here, we must always thank them for their great contribution. The reason for its extinction may also be related to us.
50. Two brain research topics always seem to attract geniuses and crackpots. One is consciousness and the other is the question of how language has evolved.
Being able to explain consciousness and language is a complicated question that many scientists still cannot answer today.
