The result led Ramachandran to speculate on the wider sensory causes of a variety of mental conditions that had previously been ascribed to brain malfunction. He postulated that schizophrenics who hear voices may have suffered damage to a sensory mechanism in their vocal cords which signals to the brain, when healthy people think, to let it know that no one is actually saying the thought. If that mechanism is faulty, Ramachandran suggests, then an unconscious movement of the vocal cords might be perceived as an external voice speaking in the schizophrenic's head.
This kind of gadfly speculation, founded on a mixture of solid research, inspired intuition and a free-ranging imagination, has shaped Ramachandran's scientific outlook ever since he was a boy. He was born into a well-established Brahmin family in Tamil Nadu in India. His father was a UN diplomat and his grandfather a former attorney general of Madras who had helped draft the Indian constitution.
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