Recorded at D.G. Wills Books, La Jolla, CA.
V.S. Ramachandran is Director of the Center for Brain and Cognition and Professor with the Psychology Department and the Neurosciences Program at UC San Diego. A former BBC Reith Lecturer, he wrote Phantoms in the Brain: Probing the Mysteries of the Human Mind (with Sandra Blakeslee), and is the author of A Brief Tour of Human Consciousness: From Impostor Poodles to Purple Numbers. His latest book, The Tell-Tale Brain: A Neuroscientist's Quest for What Makes Us Human explores human uniqueness and illustrates how we can better understand the normal by studying the abnormal. Called “The Marco Polo of neuroscience” by Richard Dawkins and “The modern Paul Broca” by Eric Kandel, Ramachandran has also been celebrated in the epidemic of medical melodramas: in the episode "The Tyrant" of the television show House, MD., Dr. House cures phantom limb pain using Ramachandran's mirror box.
