At the University of California San Diego, V.S. Ramachandran strives to work past a mere definition of consciousness by developing causes and explanations. Ramchandran is a very interesting man. He has had a tremendous carer in neuroscience but he can't ever seem to remember where he parked his car. He also cannot remember his wife's or his children's birthdays. Despite his memory encoding failures, Ramachandran has had much success answering many questions of psychology. A major breakthrough he made was figuring out what causes phantom limb pain. An overwhelming majority of amputees experience a tremendous amount of pain in the limb that they had removed. Ramachandran first explored the plasticity of the brain by mapping out an amputee's sensations in his amputated arm when his face was stimulated. The part of his cortex that had been responsible for the arm became responsible for the face but still caused feeling in the phantom limb. To treat the pain, Ramachandran put a mirror in front of the amputee's present limb to make it seem as the amputated limb. Essentially, Ramachandran was using the power of visual capture to trick the patient into believing their limb was still there. This therapy alleviated the pain in most cases quite effectively. Ramachandran also has theories linking synesthesia to creativity and mirror neurons to autism. What makes him a great problem solver is his ability to think simplistically, rationally, and in a divergent manner.
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