Welcome to the PLoS Biology Podcast! For the first episode, PLoS Biology Editor Ruchir Shah interviews VS Ramachandran, who is the Director of the Center for Brain and Cognition at the University of California San Diego. Dr. Ramachandran has written a number of books, including “Phantoms in the Brain” and “The Tell-Tale Brain”, about many of the neurological conditions his lab has been studying, which includes phantom limbs and synesthesia. Along with his graduate student David Brang, Dr. Ramachandran has written a new article for PLoS Biology called “Survival of the Synesthesia Gene: Why do people hear colors and taste words” (http://www.plosbiology.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pbio.1001205). In this podcast, Dr. Ramachandran and David Brang discuss the neural basis of multiple types of synesthesia, some other (rather bizarre) neurological conditions, and they even have time to discuss continental drift and the history of science.