Vilayanur S Ramachandran is Director of the Centre for Brain and Cognition
and professor with the Psychology Department and the Neurosciences
Programme at the University of California, San Diego. He is also Adjunct
Professor of Biology at the Salk Institute.
He originally trained as a doctor and obtained an
M.D. from Stanley Medical College, where he was awarded gold medals
in pathology and clinical medicine. He also studied at Trinity College,
Cambridge, where he was awarded a Ph.D. and was elected a senior Rouse-Ball
Scholar.
He has received many honours and awards including a fellowship from
All Souls College, Oxford. He is also a fellow of the Neurosciences
Institute in La Jolla and a fellow of the Institute for Advanced Studies
in Behavioural Sciences at Stanford.
He has lectured widely on art - as well as visual perception and the
brain - and is a trustee of the San Diego Museum of Art. He has published
over 120 papers in scientific journals, is Editor-in-chief of the
Encyclopaedia of Human Behaviour and author of a popular
book on neuroscience, Phantoms In The Brain.
Professor Ramachandran's work has concentrated on investigating phenomena
such as phantom limbs, anosognosia or denial of paralysis, Capgras
syndrome, and anorexia nervosa.
Although most of these conditions have been know since the turn of
the century they have usually been treated as curiosities and there
has been almost no experimental work on them. V.S. Ramachandran has
brought them from the clinic to the laboratory and shown that an intensive
study of these patients can often provide valuable new insights into
the workings of the human brain.
