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IMPROVING LIVES BY IMPROVING BRAINS

A remarkable story

of self discovery that will transform your

thinking about living with disability and what could and should be done about it.

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Vilayanur S. Ramachandran
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Vilayanur Subramanian Ramachandran is an Indian-American neuroscientist. Ramachandran is known for his wide-ranging experiments and theories in behavioral neurology, including the invention of the mirror box. He is a Distinguished Professor in UCSD's Department of Psychology, where he is the director of the Center for Brain and Cognition.

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.
- V. S. Ramachandran

There is no real independent self, aloof from other human beings, inspecting the world, inspecting other people. You are, in fact, connected not just via Facebook and Internet, you're actually quite literally connected by your neurons. - V. S. Ramachandran

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.
- V. S. Ramachandran

There is no real independent self, aloof from other human beings, inspecting the world, inspecting other people. You are, in fact, connected not just via Facebook and Internet, you're actually quite literally connected by your neurons. - V. S. Ramachandran

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

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. - V. S. Ramachandran

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

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. - V. S. Ramachandran

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. - V. S. Ramachandran

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. - V. S. Ramachandran

The minute you succumb to outside pressure, you cease to be creative. - V. S. Ramachandran

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. - V. S. Ramachandran

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