Dr. Vilayanur Subramian Ramachandran, VS Ramachandran is Director of the Center for Brain and Cognition and Professor with the Psychology Department and Neurosciences Program at the University of California, San Diego, and also Adjunct Professor of Biology at the Salk Institute. V.S. Ramachandran was born in Tamil Nadu, India, the son of an Indian diplomat, and as a consequence, spent much of his youth moving among several different posts in India and other parts of Asia. After receiving his M.D. from Stanley Medical College in Madras in 1974, he moved to Trinity College, Cambridge, where he obtained his Ph.D. in neuroscience and experimental psychology. He was then a postdoctoral fellow at the Physiology Department at Oxford University. His advisors were Oliver Braddick, Fergus Campbell, Horace Barlow, Colin Blakemore and (at Oxford) David Whitteridge. He then spent two years at Caltech, as a research fellow working with Jack Pettigrew. He was appointed Assistant Professor of Psychology at the University of California, San Diego in 1983, and has been a full professor at UC San Diego since 1998. While still in England, he collaborated with Richard Gregory.

Dr Ramachandran's research is around two areas, study of visual perception which investigates what someone is seeing based on what they report and another area being neurology, specifically several neurological syndromes. 

Mirror Box

He is credited as being the inventor of the "Mirror Box", a simple, cheap tool used to treat the phantom limb pain using visual feedback.

Figure: Mirror Box - The physical limb and phantom limb go in each hole. The mirror produces an illusion of the phantom arm being real - courtesy Wikipedia.org

Phantom limb pain is pain reported by patients on on a limb that was amputated some time in the past, yes pain reported on a limb that does not exist. The hypothesis was that every time the patient attempted to move the paralyzed limb, they received sensory feedback (through vision and proprioception) that the limb did not move. This feedback stamped itself into the brain circuitry through a process of Hebbian learning, so that, even when the limb was no longer present, the brain had learned that the limb (and subsequent phantom) was paralyzed. Often a phantom limb is painful because it is felt to be stuck in an uncomfortable or unnatural position, and the patient feels they cannot move it.

Video: TV series house using the mirror box. Ignore the drama, it might not be as simple as eliminating the pain in one session of theraphy, but you get the idea.

Repeated therapeutic training has shown great improvement in patients and in some cases eliminated the phantom arm completely. The success of the mirror box has extended its using into rehabilitation of stroke and spatial neglect.

Dr VS Ramachandran is a great speaker and writer. He has an interesting way of explaining complex neurological jargon when he speaks. 

On Ted Talk

 See the video below, Dr Ramachandran's presentation in Ted Talk: 

Video: Ted Talk - Vilayanur Ramachandran tells us what brain damage can reveal about the connection between celebral tissue and the mind, using three startling delusions as examples.  

Publications

Ramachandran, VS, & Blakeslee, S (1998). Phantoms in the Brain. William Morrow, N.Y.
Ramachandran, VS (2002). Encyclopedia of the Human Brain. Academic Press, San Diego.
Ramachandran, VS (2003). The Emerging Mind. BBC/Profile Books, London.
Ramachandran, VS (2004). A Brief Tour of Human Consciousness: From Impostor Poodles to Purple Numbers. New York: Pi Press.
Ramachandran, VS (2008). The Man with the Phantom Twin: Adventures in the Neuroscience of the Human Brain, Due out June, 2008. Dutton Adult, N.Y. 

Further Reading

Neurons that shaped civilization - Ted Talk by Dr. V.S. Ramachandran
Mirror Box - Wikipedia
Dr V.S. Ramachandran  - His bio page from ucsd.edu