V. S. Ramachandran
Neuroscientist and neurology author
V. S. Ramachandran is an Indian-American neuroscientist who works in behavioral neurology. He invented the mirror box and wrote Phantoms in the Brain.
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Indian Born 1951 in Tamil Nadu, India
About V. S. Ramachandran
Vilayanur Subramanian Ramachandran was born in 1951. He trained in medicine in India and earned his PhD at Cambridge in 1978. He is a distinguished professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), where he directs the Center for Brain and Cognition. His research has mostly covered behavioral neurology and visual psychophysics. After early work on human vision, he turned to wider questions in neurology, including phantom limbs and phantom pain. He invented the mirror box and mirror therapy; the therapy is now widely used to reduce phantom pain and to help stroke patients regain movement in weakened limbs. Phantoms in the Brain (1998) describes clinical studies of people with unusual conditions such as synesthesia and Capgras syndrome. He also wrote The Tell-Tale Brain and gave the 2003 BBC Reith Lectures. In 2007 he received the Padma Bhushan from the President of India.