Vilayanur S. Ramachandran Quotes

Mind is memory, not intelligence.

As followers of natural science we know nothing of any relation between thoughts and the brain, except as a gross correlation in time and space.

We will move from looking at correlations between brain activity and behaviour to studying how the brain causes mental states and behaviour.

Language is the mother of thought, not its handmaiden.

It was quite difficult to find a place to do what we wanted, namely to study the neurological basis of behaviour and especially learning and memory, which we were particularly interested in.

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.

If you will give the matter a moment's thought, you'll see that memory is the highest faculty of the human mind.

The brain is the black box: the final frontier.

It's one thing thinking something and another thing knowing it.

It means nothing to be open to a proposition we don't understand.

I think he's beginning to understand, and understanding is a horrible thing.

Insight is not a matter of memory, of knowledge and time, which are all thought.

I never am really satisfied that I understand anything; because, understand it well as I may, my comprehension can only be an infinitesimal fraction of all I want to understand about the many connections and relations which occur to me, how the matter in question was first thought of or arrived at, etc., etc.

The surgeon knows all the parts of the brain but he does not know his patient's dreams.

To see, to hear, means nothing. To recognize (or not to recognize) means everything.

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

Then there is the further question of what is the relationship of thinking to reality. As careful attention shows, thought itself is in an actual process of movement. That is to say, one can feel a sense of flow in the stream of consciousness not dissimilar to the sense of flow in the movement of matter in general. May not thought itself thus be a part of reality as a whole? But then, what could it mean for one part of reality to 'know' another, and to what extent would this be possible?

To know the brain...is equivalent to ascertaining the material course of thought and will, to discovering the intimate history of life in its perpetual duel with external forces.

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

If we could look through the skull into the brain of a consciously thinking person, and if the place of optimal excitability were luminous, then we should see playing over the cerebral surface, a bright spot with fantastic, waving borders constantly fluctuating in size and form, surrounded by a darkness more or less deep, covering the rest of the hemisphere.

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.

Thinking is the desire to gain reality by means of ideas.

If you understand something in only one way, then you don't really understand it at all. The secret of what anything means to us depends on how we've connected it to all other things we know. Well-connected representations let you turn ideas around in your mind, to envision things from many perspectives until you find one that works for you. And that's what we mean by thinking!