Vilayanur S. Ramachandran Quotes

I am a living contradiction.

When the brain gets lost, it doesn't stop working. It tries to makes sense of things. It begins to speculate and guess, and that's when things open up. That's exciting.

Contradiction is not a sign of falsity, nor the lack of contradiction a sign of truth.

To begin with, you must realize that any idea accepted by the brain is automatically transformed into an action of some sort. It may take seconds or minutes or longer - but ideas always produce a reaction of some sort.

It's like I have three different brains.

I'm a simple country neuroscientist, not an expert on democracy, but I do know something about how the brain works and how opinion-reinforcing bubbles can distort the picture of reality we build from the information we encounter on a daily basis.

Our brains are very, very good at self-delusion. What happens is, it releases the stress hormone cortisol in the brain, which leads to foggy thinking, so you're not even able to judge well whether you're working well or not.

We all live with contradictions.

Absurdity is one of the most human things about us: a manifestation of our most advanced and interesting characteristics.

What a weak, credulous, incredulous, unbelieving, superstitious, bold, frightened, what a ridiculous world ours is, as far as concerns the mind of man. How full of inconsistencies, contradictions and absurdities it is. I declare that taking the average of many minds that have recently come before me ... I should prefer the obedience, affections and instinct of a dog before it.

Volition . . . takes place only when there are a number of conflicting systems of ideas, and depends on our having a complex field of consciousness.

Man's brain, enlarged fortuitously, invented words in an ambitious attempt to learn how to think, only to have them usurped by his emotions. But we still try.

Just like a good drama, the human brain runs on conflict.

Man is not a rational animal, he is a rationalizing animal.

It was strange how your brain could know what your heart refused to accept.

I don't pretend to be wise, but I am observing, and I see a great deal more than you'd imagine. I'm interested in other people's experiences and inconsistencies, and, though I can't explain, I remember and use them for my own benefit.

That's some catch, that Catch-22," he observed. It's the best there is," Doc Daneeka agreed.

One of the great conditions of anger and hatred is, that you must tell and believe lies against the hated object, in order, as we said, to be consistent.

Reality is, you know, the tip of an iceberg of irrationality that we've managed to drag ourselves up onto for a few panting moments before we slip back into the sea of the unreal.

A neurotic can neither enjoy his illusions nor give them up.

The capacity of the human mind for swallowing nonsense and spewing it forth in violent and repressive action has never yet been plumbed.

The thing I want to know is, if you tell your brain not to do stuff... and it keeps doing it anyway, does that mean your mind has a mind of its own? And if it does, then who's in charge here, anyway?

Psychoanalysis can unravel some of the forms of madness; it remains a stranger to the sovereign enterprise of unreason. It can neither limit nor transcribe, nor most certainly explain, what is essential in this enterprise.

To the extent to which a man is rational, life is the premise directing his actions. To the extent to which he is irrational, the premise directing his actions is death.