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.

[13] 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.

[14][15][16] 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.

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.

In an interview with Frontline magazine[20] 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.

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.

[23][24] 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.

[32] In 1999 Ramachandran and Eric Altschuler expanded the mirror technique from amputees to improving the muscle control of stroke patients with weakened limbs.

"[39] 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".

[42][43][44][45] 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.

[55][56] 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.

[58] 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.

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.

Responses showed that trans women experienced phantom penile sensations at significantly lower rates than cis men who have undergone a penectomy.

In 2017, Laura Case, Brang, Ramachandran, and some other authors, found that trans men experience altered brain activity in regions associated with xenomelia when their breasts are touched.

[68] 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.

For example, from his biography at Edge.org:[72] In 2005 he was awarded the Henry Dale Medal[73] and elected to an honorary life membership by the Royal Institution of Great Britain,[73] where he also gave a Friday evening discourse (joining the ranks of Michael Faraday, Thomas Huxley, Humphry Davy and others.)