Вилаянур Рамачандран: Индийско-американский нейробиолог и его открытия.

Indian American neuroscientist

Vilayanur Subramanian Ramachandran (born 10 August 1951) is an Indian American neuroscientist. He is known for his wide ranging experiments and theories in behavioral neurology, including the invention of the mirror box. Ramachandran is a distinguished professor in UCSD's Department of Psychology, where he is the director of the Center for Brain and Cognition. After earning a medical degree in India, Ramachandran studied experimental neuroscience at Cambridge, obtaining his PhD there in 1978. Most of his research has been in the fields of behavioral neurology and visual psychophysics. After early work on human vision, Ramachandran turned to work on wider aspects of neurology including phantom limbs and phantom pain. Ramachandran have also performed the world's first "phantom limb amputation" surgeries by inventing the mirror therapy, which is now widely used for reducing phantom pains (and eliminating phantom sensations altogether in long term), and also for helping to restore motor control in stroke victims with weakened limbs. Ramachandran's popular books Phantoms in the Brain (1998), The Tell Tale Brain (2010), and others describe neurological and clinical studies of people with synesthesia, Capgras syndrome, and a wide range of other unusual conditions. Ramachandran has also described his work in many public lectures, including lectures for the BBC, and two official TED talks. Both his scientific research and his popularization of science have been recognized with multiple awards.

Ramachandran was born in 1951 in Tamil Nadu, India. His mother had a degree in mathematics. His grandfather was Alladi Krishnaswamy Iyer, one of the framers of India's constitution. Ramachandran, whose father wanted him to become a physician rather than a researcher, obtained an M. B. B. S. from Stanley Medical College in Chennai, India. In 1978, Ramachandran obtained a Ph. D. from Trinity College at the University of Cambridge. Later he moved to the US, where he spent two years at Caltech as a research fellow working with Jack Pettigrew before being appointed assistant professor of psychology at the University of California, San Diego in 1983. He became a full professor there in 1988. He currently holds the rank of distinguished professor in the UCSD Psychology Department, and is the director of its Center for Brain and Cognition, where he works with graduate students and researchers from UCSD and elsewhere on emerging theories in neuroscience. and an adjunct professor at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies. In 1987, Ramachandran married a fellow scientist who became his frequent co author as Diane Rogers Ramachandran. They have two sons, Chandramani and Jaya. Ramachandran then began research on phantom limbs, but later moved on to study a wider range of neurological mysteries, including body integrity identity disorder and the Capgras delusion. Ramachandran has encountered skepticism about some of his theories. Ramachandran has responded, "I have—for better or worse—roamed the whole landscape of visual perception, stereopsis, phantom limbs, denial of paralysis, Capgras syndrome, synaesthesia, and many others." Ramachandran has served as a consultant in areas such as forensic psychology and the neuroscience of weight reduction. In 2007, Ramachandran served as an expert witness on pseudocyesis (false pregnancy) at the trial of Lisa M. Montgomery. Ramachandran has served as a consultant to the Modius company which is developing weight reduction technology that relies on electrically stimulating parts of the brain that control weight loss. Ramachandran is collaborating with Indian doctors doing research on Mucuna pruriens, an ayurvedic (Indian natural medicine) therapy for Parkinson's disease. In his scientific work, Ramachandran often uses simple equipment, such as mirrors or old fashioned stereoscopes, rather than complex brain imaging technologies such as fMRI. Ramachandran has been outspoken about his intuition based approach to studying the brain. In an interview with Frontline magazine Ramachandran stated:Intuition is what gets you started; then you need empirical studies brain imaging technology often lulls you into a false sense of having understood what's going on. So sometimes, not having technology that's my own approach and that of some of my colleagues, we use it only when it's absolutely essential, just like medical diagnostics. We rely more on intuition in doing simple experiments, because if you rely on fancy medical imaging, you become less creative.

When an arm or leg is amputated, patients often continue to feel vividly the presence of the missing limb as a "phantom limb" (an average of 80%). Building on earlier work by Ronald Melzack (McGill University) and Timothy Pons (NIMH), Ramachandran theorized that there was a link between the phenomenon of phantom limbs and neural plasticity in the adult human brain. To test this theory, Ramachandran recruited amputees, so that he could learn more about if phantom limbs could "feel" a stimulus to other parts of the body. In 1992, in collaboration with T. T. Yang, S. Gallen, and others at the Scripps Research Institute who were conducting MEG research, Ramachandran initiated a project to demonstrate that there had been measurable changes in the somatosensory cortex of a patient who had undergone an arm amputation. Ramachandran theorized that there was a relationship between the cortical reorganization evident in the MEG image and the non painful referred sensations he had observed in other subjects. Later researchers found that non painful phantom limbs correlated less with motor or somatosensory plasticity than painful phantom limbs. Recent research has also shown that the peripheral nervous system is involved in painful phantom limb phenomena. Research continues into more precise mechanisms and explanations.

Mirror neurons were first reported in a paper published in 1992 by a team of researchers led by Giacomo Rizzolatti at the University of Parma. According to Rizzolati, "Mirror neurons are a specific type of visuomotor neuron that discharge both when a monkey executes a motor act and when it observes a similar motor act performed by another individual." In 2000, Ramachandran made what he called some "purely speculative conjectures" that "mirror neurons [in humans] 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." Ramachandran has suggested that research into the role of mirror neurons could help explain a variety of human mental capacities such as empathy, imitation learning, and the evolution of language. In a 2001 essay for Edge, Ramachandran speculated that I suggested that in addition to providing a neural substrate for figuring out another persons intentions the emergence and subsequent sophistication of mirror neurons in hominids may have played a crucial role in many quintessentially human abilities such as empathy, learning through imitation (rather than trial and error), and the rapid transmission of what we call "culture". (And the "great leap forward" — the rapid Lamarckian transmission of "accidental") one of a kind inventions. Ramchandran's speculations about the connection of mirror neurons with empathy have been contested by some authors and supported by others.

In 1999, Ramachandran, in collaboration with then post doctoral fellow Eric Altschuler and colleague Jaime Pineda, hypothesized that a dysfunction of mirror neuron activity might be responsible for some of the symptoms and signs of autism spectrum disorders. Between 2000 and 2006 Ramachandran and his colleagues at UC San Diego published a number of articles in support of this theory, which became known as the "Broken Mirrors" theory of autism. Ramachandran and his colleagues did not measure mirror neuron activity directly; rather they demonstrated that children with ASD showed abnormal EEG responses (known as Mu wave suppression) when they observed the activities of other people. In The Tell Tale Brain (2010), Ramachandran states that the evidence for mirror neuron dysfunction in autism is "compelling but not conclusive."

Ramachandran was one of the first scientists to theorize that grapheme color synesthesia arises from a cross activation between brain regions. Ramachandran and his graduate student, Ed Hubbard, conducted research with functional magnetic resonance imaging that found increased activity in the color recognition areas of the brain in synesthetes compared to non synesthetes. Ramachandran has speculated that conceptual metaphors may also have a neurological basis in cortical cross activation. As of 2015, the neurological basis of synesthesia had not been established.

In 2008, Ramachandran, along with David Brang and Paul McGeoch, published the first paper to theorize that apotemnophilia is a neurological disorder caused by damage to the right parietal lobe of the brain. This rare disorder, in which a person desires the amputation of a limb, was first identified by John Money in 1977. Building on medical case studies that linked brain damage to syndromes such as somatoparaphrenia (lack of limb ownership), the authors speculated that the desire for amputation could be related to changes in the right parietal lobe. In 2011, McGeoch, Brang and Ramachandran reported a functional imaging experiment involving four subjects who desired lower limb amputations. MEG scans demonstrated that their right superior parietal lobules were significantly less active in response to tactile stimulation of a limb that the subjects wished to have amputated, as compared to age and sex matched controls. The authors introduced the word xenomelia to describe this syndrome, which is derived from the Greek for "foreign" and "limb".

Ramachandran is the author of several popular books on neurology such as Phantoms in the Brain (1998) and The Tell Tale Brain (2010). Phantoms in the Brain became the basis for a 2001 PBS Nova special. In 2003, the BBC chose Ramachandran to deliver that year's Reith Lectures, a series of radio lectures. Ramachandran's five radio talks on the topic "The Emerging Mind" were afterward published as a book with the same title. Ramachandran has also given many talks, including TED talks in 2007 and 2010. In 1997, Newsweek included him on a list of one hundred "personalities whose creativity or talent or brains or leadership will make a difference in the years ahead." In 2008, Foreign Policy included Ramachandran as one of its "World’s Top 100 Public Intellectuals." Similarly, in 2011, Time listed Ramachandran as one of "the most influential people in the world" on the "Time 100 list". Both the Time and the Prospect selections were decided by public voting on a longer list of names proposed by the organization.

Ramachandran has received many academic and other honors. For example, from his biography at Edge. org:
In 2005 he was awarded the Henry Dale Medal and from Stanford University (Hilgard Visiting Professor); the Presidential Lecture Award from the American Academy of Neurology, two honorary doctorates, the annual Ramon y Cajal award from the International Neuropsychiatry Society, and the Ariens Kappers medal from the Royal Netherlands Academy of Sciences. In 2007, the president of India conferred on him the third highest civilian award and honorific title in India, the Padma Bhushan. In 2014, the ARCS Foundation (Achievement Rewards for College Scientists) named Ramachandran its "Scientist of the Year."

Phantoms in the Brain: Probing the Mysteries of the Human Mind, coauthor Sandra Blakeslee, 1998 Encyclopedia of the Human Brain (editor in chief), three volumes, 2002 The Emerging Mind, 2003 A Brief Tour of Human Consciousness: From Impostor Poodles to Purple Numbers, 2005 (; paperback edition). The Tell Tale Brain: A Neuroscientist's Quest for What Makes Us Human, 2010 The Encyclopedia of Human Behavior (editor in chief), four volume second edition, 2012 .