He is the son of Jorge Enrique Llinás (a surgeon of Spanish descent, whose family arrived in Colombia at the end of the 19th century)[2] and Bertha Riascos.

[3] Llinás went to the Gimnasio Moderno school in Bogotá and graduated as a medical doctor from the Pontifical Xavierian University in 1959.

[4] During his medical studies he had the opportunity to travel to Europe and there he met several researchers in Spain, France and finally Switzerland, where he participated in neurophysiology experiments with Dr. Walter Rudolf Hess, Nobel Prize in Physiology, Medicine, professor and director of the Department of the Institute of Physiology of the University of Zurich.

Additionally, while studying medicine he made a theoretical thesis on the visual system under the tuition of neurosurgeon and neurophysiologist Fernando Rosas and the mathematician Carlo Federici at the National University of Colombia.

In 2018, Llinás donated a T-Rex skeleton to the museum and helped to design a model of the nervous system for the dinosaur fossils.