Vilayanur S. Ramachandran

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Vilayanur S. Ramachandran bigraphy, stories - Neuroscientist

Vilayanur S. Ramachandran : biography

1951 –

Vilayanur Subramanian Ramachandran (born 1951) is a neuroscientist known for his work in the fields of behavioral neurology and visual psychophysics. He is the Director of the Center for Brain and Cognition, and is currently a Professor in the Department of Psychology and the Neurosciences Graduate Program at the University of California, San Diego.

Ramachandran is noted for his use of experimental methods that rely relatively little on complex technologies such as neuroimaging. Despite the apparent simplicity of his approach, Ramachandran has generated many new ideas about the brain.Anthony, , The Observer, January 29, 2011. He has been called "The Marco Polo of neuroscience" by Richard Dawkins and "the modern Paul Broca" by Eric Kandel.A Brief Tour of Human Consciousness, 2004, Back Cover In 1997 Newsweek named him a member of "The Century Club", one of the "hundred most prominent people to watch" in the 21st century. In 2011 Time listed him as one of "the most influential people in the world" on the "Time 100" list. The citation by Tom Insel, Director of NIH, reads: "Once described as the Marco Polo of neuroscience, V.S. Ramachandran has mapped some of the most mysterious regions of the mind. He has studied visual perception and a range of conditions, from synesthesia to autism. V.S. Ramachandran is changing how our brains think about our minds."In public polling of the people included in the 2011 list, Ramachandran ranked 97 out of 100. Ramachandran is the author of several books that have garnered widespread public interest. These include Phantoms In the Brain (1999) and more recently The Tell-Tale Brain (2010).

Minotaurasaurus ramachandrani

An interest in paleontology led him to purchase a fossil dinosaur skull from the Gobi Desert, which was named after him as Minotaurasaurus ramachandrani in 2009. A minor controversy surfaced around the provenance of this skull. Some paleontologists claim that this fossil was removed from the Gobi desert without the permission of the Chinese government and sold without proper documentation. V.S. Ramachandran, who purchased the fossil in Tucson, Arizona, says that he would be happy to repatriate the fossil to the appropriate nation, if someone shows him "evidence it was exported without permit". For now, the specimen rests at the , an hour’s drive east of Los Angeles in Apple Valley, California.

Books authored

  • Phantoms in the Brain: Probing the Mysteries of the Human Mind, coauthor Sandra Blakeslee, 1998, ISBN 0-688-17217-2
  • The Encyclopedia of the Human Brain (editor-in-chief) ISBN 0-12-227210-2
  • The Emerging Mind, 2003, ISBN 1-86197-303-9
  • A Brief Tour of Human Consciousness: From Impostor Poodles to Purple Numbers, 2005, ISBN 0-13-187278-8 (paperback edition)
  • The Tell-Tale Brain: A Neuroscientist’s Quest for What Makes Us Human, 2010, ISBN 978-0-393-07782-7

Public lectures

Ramachandran is known for his engaging style as a public lecturer. He has presented keynote addresses and public lectures in the U.S., Canada, Britain, Australia and India. He gave the Decade of the Brain lecture at the 25th annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience in 1995, the Beatty Memorial Talk in 1997 (McGill University),Past Beatty Talks web site, McGill Universtiy and the Keynote Lecture at the 1999 Decade of the Brain meeting before the NIH and the Library of Congress, as well as the Rabindranath Tagore lecture at the Centre for Philosophy and Foundations of Science in New Delhi. In 2003 he gave the annual BBC Reith Lectures. In 2007 he gave a public lecture that was part of a series sponsored by the Templeton Foundation at the Royal Society in London. He gave the 2010 IAS Distinguished Lecture at the University of Bristol’s Institute of Advanced Studies dedicated to the memory of his longtime friend and collaborator, Richard Gregory. In October 2011, Ramachandran delivered a lecture titled "The Neurology of Human Nature" at the 47th Nobel Conference at Gustavus Adolphus College in Saint Peter, Minnesota. In 2012, he gave the Gifford Lectures (May 28, 2012 – May 30, 2012) at the University of Glasgow.