Vilayanur S. Ramachandran - Encyclopedia of Human Behavior

David M. Buss University of Texas, Austin, Texas, USA

Richard B. Buxton University of California, San Diego, California, USA

Nicholas Christenfeld University of California, San Diego, California, USA

Orrin Devinsky New York University, New York, New York, USA

Albert M. Galaburda Harvard Medical School, Boston, Massachusetts, USA

William Hirstein Elmhurst College, Elmhurst, Illinois, USA

William G. Iacono University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA

John T. Jost New York University, New York, New York, USA

Jerome Kagan Harvard University, Boston, Massachusetts, USA

Leif E.O. Kennair Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim, Norway

David E. Presti University of California, Berkeley, California, USA

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V.S. Ramachandran, MD, PhD., is Director of the Center for Brain and Cognition and professor with the Psychology Department and the Neurosciences Program at the University of California, San Diego, and Adjunct Professor of Biology at the Salk Institute. Ramachandran trained as a physician and obtained an MD from Stanley Medical College and subsequently a PhD from Trinity College at the University of Cambridge, where he was elected a Senior Rouse Ball Scholar. Ramachandrans early research was on visual perception, but he is best known for his work in neurology.

He has received many honors and awards, including a fellowship from All Souls College, Oxford, an honorary doctorate from Connecticut College, a gold medal from the Australian National University, the Ariens Kappers Medal from the Royal Netherlands Academy of Sciences for landmark contributions in neuroscience, and the presidential lecture award from the American Academy of Neurology. He is also a fellow of the Neurosciences Institute in La Jolla and a fellow of the Institute for Advanced Studies in Behavioral Sciences at Stanford. He was invited by the BBC to give the Reith Lectures on The Emerging Mind in 2003 and is the first physician/experimental psychologist to be given this honor since the series was begun by Bertrand Russell in 1949 these lectures were subsequently published as A Brief Tour of Human Consciousness: From Impostor Poodles to Purple Numbers.

In 1995, he gave the Decade of the Brain Lecture at the 25th annual (silver jubilee) meeting of the Society for Neuroscience and more recently, the inaugural keynote lecture at the Decade of the Brain conference held by NIMH at the Library of Congress and a public lecture at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles. He also gave the first Hans Lucas Teuber lecture at MIT, the D.O. Hebb lecture at McGill, the RudelMoses lecture at Columbia, the Dorcas Cumming (inaugural keynote) lecture at Cold Spring Harbor, the Raymond Adams neurology grand rounds at Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard, and the Jonas Salk memorial lecture, Salk Institute.

Ramachandran is a trustee for the San Diego Museum of Art and has lectured widely on art, visual perception, and the brain. Ramachandran has published over 120 papers in scientific journals (including three invited review articles in Scientific American), coauthor (with Sandra Blakesleee) of Phantoms in the Brain that has been translated into eight languages and formed the basis for a two-part series on Channel Four TV in the UK and a one-hour PBS special in the United States. His work is featured frequently in the major news media including BBC and PBS. Newsweek magazine recently named him a member of The Century Club, one of the hundred most prominent people to watch in the next century.