18 Quotes by V.S. Ramachandran

Homogeneity breeds weakness: theoretical blind spots, stale paradigms, an echo-chamber mentality, and cults of personality.

How does language interact with thought? Does language enable us to think, or does thinking enable us to talk? Can we think in a sophisticated manner without silent internal speech? And lastly, how did this extraordinarily complex, multicomponent system originally come into existence in our hominin ancestors?

Art can be thought of as a form of visual foreplay before the climax.

So here is the greatest irony of all: that the self that almost by definition is entirely private is to significant extent a social construct.

Indeed, one could go so far as to say that humor helps as an effective antidote against a useless struggle against the ultimate danger: the ever-present fear of death in self-conscious beings like us.

All good science emerges from an imaginative conception of what might be true.

How does language interact with thought? Does language enable us to think, or does thinking enable us to talk?

So the quest for biological laws shouldn’t be driven by a quest for simplicity or elegance. No woman who has been through labor would say that it’s an elegant solution to giving birth to a baby.

Science tells us we are merely beasts, but we don’t feel like that. We feel like angels trapped inside the bodies of beasts, forever craving transcendence.