Behavioral neurology in the context of "Neuropsychology"

Neuropsychiatry is a branch of medicine that deals with psychiatry as it relates to neurology, in an effort to understand and attribute behavior to the interaction of neurobiology and social psychology factors. Within neuropsychiatry, the mind is considered "as an emergent property of the brain", whereas other behavioral and neurological specialties might consider the two as separate entities. Those disciplines are typically practiced separately.

Currently, neuropsychiatry has become a growing subspecialty of neurology as it closely relates the fields of neuropsychology and behavioral neurology, and attempts to utilize this understanding to better understand psychological trauma, autism, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), and Tourette syndrome, among others.

Vilayanur Subramanian Ramachandran (born 10 August 1951) is an Indian-American neuroscientist. He is known for his experiments and theories in behavioral neurology, including the invention of the mirror box. Ramachandran is a distinguished professor in UCSD's Department of Psychology, where he is the director of the Center for Brain and Cognition.

After earning a medical degree in India, Ramachandran studied experimental neuroscience at Cambridge, obtaining his PhD there in 1978. Most of his research has been in the fields of behavioral neurology and visual psychophysics. After early work on human vision, Ramachandran turned to work on wider aspects of neurology including phantom limbs and phantom pain. Ramachandran also performed the world's first "phantom limb amputation" surgeries by inventing the mirror therapy, which is now widely used for reducing phantom pains (with the goal of eliminating phantom sensations altogether in long term), and also for helping to restore motor control in stroke victims with weakened limbs.