Interviews with the Masters: A Companion to Robert Greene’s Mastery by Robert Greene

Author:Robert Greene [Greene, Robert]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Brass Check Marketing
Published: 2013-11-14T20:07:00+00:00

VS Ramachandran

UCSD

VS Ramachandran was born in 1951, in Madras, India. He trained as a doctor, then switched fields to study visual psychology at Trinity College at the University of Cambridge in England, where he received his PhD. In 1983 he was appointed assistant professor of psychology at the University of San Diego (UCSD). He is currently a Distinguished Professor in the Psychology Department and Neurosciences Program at UCSD, and also serves as the director of the university’s Center for Brain and Cognition. He is best known for his work on bizarre neurological syndromes such as phantom libs, various body-identity disorders, Capgras delusion (in which the sufferer believes that family members have been replaced by impostors), and for his theories on mirror neurons and synesthesia. Among his numerous awards, he has been elected to an honorary life membership to the Royal Institution of Great Britain, fellowships from Oxford University and Stanford University, and the annual Ramon Y Cajal award from the International Neuropsychiatry Society. In 2011 Time magazine listed him as “one of the most influential people in the world.” He is the author of the best-selling Phantoms in the Brain (1998), as well as A Brief Tour of Human Consciousness: From Impostor Poodles to Purple Numbers (2005), and The Tell-Tale Brain: A Neuroscientist’s Quest for What Makes Us Human (2010).

Robert: I want to go into your childhood. I gleaned a few things about . . . There are scientists on your mother’s side. You were encouraged, I suppose. They gave you a microscope and things like that.

VSR: That was my father. That was only when I turned 11 or 12. I’m not really talking about much earlier in childhood. If I go back further in childhood, I think loneliness contributed a lot. Undoubtedly, these scientist uncles of mine and cousins planted seeds. It influences you when you're a child. I don't know how much of an influence but you go to dinner and you go to their homes and they're talking about Newton doing something to somebody else. It plants seeds in your head, the stories of science. The seeds were really planted by my teachers when I was probably between 9 and 13. What do you call it here? Junior.

Robert: Nine and 13, that would be elementary, grammar school going into junior high. Middle school now.

VSR: This was pre-high school. That would be called junior high right?

Robert: Now I think they call it middle school. In my day, it was junior high.

VSR: Okay. I think more like between the age of 10 to 13.

Robert: Okay.

VSR: That’s when the seeds were all really planted. It was because of teachers in Bangkok, Thailand who had extraordinary imagination and would give us chemicals to take it home and play with them. I think it had a bigger influence than people who are naturally inclined. There is a general component, I’m sure there is. I had another friend, Cookie, who was also considered the class nerd. I was maybe considered not the ultimate nerd, but a bit of a nerd.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.