Vilayanur S. Ramachandran Quotes

We think of our eyes as video cameras and our brains as blank tapes to be filled with sensory inputs.

We think that the world is a solid, vivid place, full of shape and colour and solid objects like this table and this microphone and so on, but we actually create that in our heads out of the bits of information that hit the back of our eyeballs or hit our eardrums or hit our tongues or whatever.

So how, children, does the brain, which lives without a spark of light, build for us a world full of light?

Your world is all these elements. Of light and sound, of taste, smell, and touch, woven together in many dimensions on the fabulous loom of your brain. Your brain; the most complicated thing in the world, which you yourself grew...without even thinking about it.

The eye and brain are conspirators, and, like most conspiracies, theirs is negotiated behind closed doors, in the back room, outside of our awareness.

People seen by the mind are exactly different to things seen by the eye. They grow smaller and smaller as you come nearer down to them, whereas things become bigger.

We cannot study the brain, the instrument for fabricating the realities we inhabit, using the mental constructs of the past.

Much of our waking experience is but a dream in the daylight.

Because our entire universe is made up of consciousness, we never really experience the universe directly we just experience our consciousness of the universe, our perception of it, so right, our only universe is perception.

99 percent of what you see is not what comes in through the eyes. It is what you infer about that room.

When I see a colour or hear a sound, I am aware of something, and not of nothing.

Doesn't everyone see Reality as it is?

The world consists of images on a screen, and consciousness is the steady light that emanates from the projector.

How do we see physically? No differently that we do in our consciousness - by means of the productive power of imagination. Consciousness is the eye and ear, the sense for inner and outer meaning.

The eye always fills in the imperfections.

In ordinary speech the words perception and sensation tend to be used interchangeably, but the psychologist distinguishes. Sensations are the items of consciousness--a color, a weight, a texture--that we tend to think of as simple and single. Perceptions are complex affairs that embrace sensation together with other, associated or revived contents of the mind, including emotions.

Mind is memory, not intelligence.

One of the most pervasive mistakes is to believe that our visual system gives a faithful representation of what is "out there" in the same way that a movie camera would.

You can't be conscious unless you have variable receptors... When people say the way I see the world is the way it is - that's ridiculous. We can only see it depending on the quality of our receptors and background.

External reality is sort of an affectation of the nervous system.

As for all I can tell, the only difference is that what many see we call a real thing, and what only one sees we call a dream.

The deep secret of the brain is that not only the spinal cord but the entire central nervous system works this way: internally generated activity is modulated by sensory input. In this view, the difference between being awake and being asleep is merely that the data coming in from the eyes anchors the perception.

I think seeing happens partly through the eyes, but not entirely.

The world doesn't just disappear when you close your eyes, does it?

I think if I were walking someplace and I saw a corpse my brain would tell me it was a million things before I believed it was a corpse.