In 1995, to an audience of 6,000 scientists, V.S. Ramachandran (known to friends and colleagues as “Rama”) delivered the inaugural “Decade of the Brain” lecture at the Silver Jubilee meeting of the Society for Neuroscience, this country’s leading organization for brain research. His talk, laced with wit and humor, received a standing ovation. Ramachandran also delivered the “Decade of the Brain” lecture to the Library of Congress and the NIH. He received invitations to give the Dorcus Cumming Plenary Lecture at Cold Spring Harbor and the Weissman Memorial Lecture at the Weissman Institute, Israel. He is in great demand as a speaker, both for scientific and lay audiences.
Rama is on the editorial boards of several international journals and has published over 110 scientific papers, including three invited review articles for Scientific American. He edited a four-volume Encyclopedia of Human Behavior that was cited by Library Journal as “the most outstanding reference for 1994 in the behavioral sciences.” In 1995, he was elected a member of the Atheneum, the world’s oldest scientific club, founded in London by Michael Faraday and Humphrey Davy. He has appeared on numerous television programs (PBS, BBC, German television), and his work has been featured in The New York Times, Discover, National Geographic, Time and Life.
Originally trained as a physician at Stanley Medical College, where he was awarded gold medals in pathology and clinical medicine, Ramachandran went on to earn a PhD in neurology from Trinity College at Cambridge University. Before moving to La Jolla, he held appointments at Oxford University and the California Institute of Technology. In 1998, he received a gold medal from the Australian national university, and in ’99 the Ariens Kappers Medal by the Royal Netherlands Academy of Sciences for landmark achievements in neurosciences. In the same year, he was elected a fellow of All Souls College Oxford. Newsweek named him a member of the “Century Club”—one of hundreds of people to watch as America enters the next century. Today he works exclusively with human neurological patients, and one of his main interests is in the neurological basis of art. He has been lecturing widely on this subject not only to scientists but also to art galleries and museums.
MIRROR NEURONS AND IMITATION LEARNING AS THE DRIVING FORCE BEHIND “THE GREAT LEAP FORWARD” IN HUMAN EVOLUTION
[V.S. RAMACHANDRAN:] The discovery of mirror neurons in the frontal lobes of monkeys, and their potential relevance to human brain evolution—which I speculate on in this essay—is the single most important “unreported” (or at least, unpublicized) story of the decade. I predict that mirror neurons will do for psychology what DNA did for biology: they will provide a unifying framework and help explain a host of mental abilities that have hitherto remained mysterious and inaccessible to experiments.
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