Early Life and Education
Vilayanur Subramanian Ramachandran (in accordance with some Tamil family name traditions, his family name, Vilayanur, is placed first) was born in 1951 in Tamil Nadu, India. His father, V.M. Subramanian, was an engineer who worked for the U.N. Industrial Development Organization and served as a diplomat in Bangkok, Thailand. Ramachandran spent much of his youth moving among several different posts in India and other parts of Asia. As a young man he attended schools in Madras, Bangkok and England, and pursued many scientific interests, including conchology. Ramachandran obtained an M.B.B.S. from Stanley Medical College in Madras, India, and subsequently obtained a Ph.D. from Trinity College at the University of Cambridge. While a graduate student at Cambridge, Ramachandran also collaborated on research projects with faculty at Oxford, including David Whitteridge of the Physiology Department. He then spent two years at Caltech, as a research fellow working with Jack Pettigrew. He was appointed Assistant Professor of Psychology at the University of California, San Diego in 1983, and has been a full professor there since 1998.
Ramachandran is the grandson of Sir Alladi Krishnaswamy Iyer, Advocate General of Madras and co-architect of the Constitution of India. He is married to Diane Rogers-Ramachandran and they have two boys, Mani and Jaya.
Read more about this topic: Vilayanur S. Ramachandran
Famous quotes containing the words early life, early, life and/or education:
“... goodness is of a modest nature, easily discouraged, and when much elbowed in early life by unabashed vices, is apt to retire into extreme privacy, so that it is more easily believed in by those who construct a selfish old gentleman theoretically, than by those who form the narrower judgments based on his personal acquaintance.”
—George Eliot [Mary Ann (or Marian)
“In early times every sort of advantage tends to become a military advantage; such is the best way, then, to keep it alive. But the Jewish advantage never did so; beginning in religion, contrary to a thousand analogies, it remained religious. For that we care for them; from that have issued endless consequences.”
—Walter Bagehot (1826–1877)
“What is a life or two, Guy! Some people are better off dead. Like your wife and my father, for instance.”
—Raymond Chandler (1888–1959)
“Quintilian [educational writer in Rome around A.D. 100] thought that the earliest years of the child’s life were crucial. Education should start earlier than age seven, within the family. It should not be so hard as to give the child an aversion to learning. Rather, these early lessons would take the form of play—that embryonic notion of kindergarten.”
—C. John Sommerville (20th century)