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Like many children, when Ramachandran was a young boy, he collected seashells and fossils. Unlike most children, however, he sent his findings to the American Museum of Natural History, often unearthing rarities that were of interest to the museum. He retains an abiding love of palaeontology. Two years ago, he received his most enduring honour: a dinosaur – Minotaurasaurus ramachandrani – was named after him.
Although he was attracted to pure science, under his father's instruction, he studied medicine in Madras. It was there as a second-year student that he set up an experiment to examine how the brain merges the two slightly different images seen by each eye. He decided, as he precociously put it, that "concepts of retinal rivalry need drastic revision". He wrote a paper on his findings in 1971 and sent it to Nature, arguably the world's most prestigious scientific journal, and it was published unrevised.
Soon afterwards, he found himself at Trinity College, Cambridge, doing a PhD in visual perception. His fellow scientists turned out to be disappointments. "I thought they'd be like Faraday and the great Renaissance scientists," he later complained. However, he was galvanised by a visiting lecturer from Bristol University, the neuropsychologist Richard Gregory, whom he rates as "one of the five most amazing" people he's ever met.