Vilayanur S. Ramachandran Quotes

You, your joys and sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and your free will are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules.

Everybody agrees that the brain is a remarkable machine. It's capable of generating an enormous number of phenomena, some of them very obvious and some of them less obvious. But I think that in the end there are going to be some very basic explanations for many things: emotions, awareness, consciousness, attention, perception, recognition.

The last 100 years of research into the human brain...sees the brain as an organ that works by physical principles just like the other organs in the body...our emotions and higher callings, such as religion, as well as our grubby low-level physical systems like stereo vision and motor control, are products of a machine.

the brain, the mind, and all the things that happen inside it, it's a very erogenous zone.

In the words of the late Francis Crick...You, your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules. (13)

The brain runs its show incognito.

The brain is not, and cannot be, the sole or complete organ of thought and feeling.

To explicate the uses of the Brain seems as difficult a task as to paint the Soul, of which it is commonly said, that it understands all things but itself.

Funny thing, your brain, how it always functions on one level or another. How, even stuck in some sort of subconcious limbo, it works your lungs, your muscle twitches, your heart, in fact, in symphony with your heart, allowing it to feel love. Pain. Jealousy. Guilt. I wonder if it’s the same for people, lost in comas. Is there really such a thing

I can state with complete assurance that for each of us our brains form the material basis of our experiences and memories, our imaginations, our dreams.

Consciousness is the smallest player in the operations of the brain.

Men ought to know that from the brain and from the brain only arise our pleasures, joys, laughter, and jests as well as our sorrows, pains, griefs and tears. ... It is the same thing which makes us mad or delirious, inspires us with dread and fear, whether by night or by day, brings us sleeplessness, inopportune mistakes, aimless anxieties, absent-mindedness and acts that are contrary to habit.

Brain: an apparatus with which we think that we think. Mind, n. A mysterious form of matter secreted by the brain.

The brain is a mystery; it has been and still will be. How does the brain produce thoughts? That is the central question and we have still no answer to it.

It is essential to understand our brains in some detail if we are to assess correctly our place in this vast and complicated universe we see all around us.

What does it mean, exactly, for a given system to be a 'neural correlate of consciousness'?

Anyway, there is a lot of really interesting work going on in the neuroscience and psychology of consciousness, and I would love to see philosophers become more closely involved with this.

No matter how closely you examine the water, glucose, and electrolyte salts in the human brain, you can't find the point where these molecules became conscious.

We're all just bags of bones and muscle and hormones; I'll never understand what makes our minds do the things we do. It's like that statue of the monkey holding a skull. We're trying to use a thing we don't understand to understand ourselves.

In 'Self Comes to Mind' I pay a lot of attention to simple creatures without brains or minds, because those 'cartooned abstractions of who we are' operate on precisely the same principles that we do.

Independent of what is happening around you in the outside world, humans constantly have internal activity in the brain.

I'm quite interested in my own mental processes, simply because I'm a failed scientist, and because I'm interested in how the brain and the mind works, and I like to avoid easy descriptions.

One day we shall certainly 'reduce' thought experimentally to molecular and chemical motions in the brain; but does that exhaust the essence of thought?

Listen, no part of me is more definitive of who I am than my brain.