Eric Kandel quotes

Eric Kandel is an Austrian-American neuroscientist renowned for his research on the biological mechanisms of learning and memory. His pioneering studies on the nervous system of the sea slug Aplysia have advanced our understanding of how memories are formed and stored. He has received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his contributions to neuroscience. Here are 96 of his quotes:

A brain scan may reveal the neural signs of anxiety, but a Kokoschka painting, or a Schiele self-portrait, reveals what an anxiety state really feels like. Both perspectives are necessary if we are to fully grasp the nature of the mind, yet they are rarely brought together. (Eric Kandel)
I outline in simple terms... our current understanding of the cognitive psychological and neurobiological basis of perception, memory, emotion, empathy, and creativity. ...the principles of the viewer's response to art are applicable to all periods of painting. View quote
Eric Kandel
The Vienna School of Art History, influenced in part by Sigmund Freud's psychological work, began to develop a science-based psychology of art that was initially focused on the beholder. Today, the new science of mind has... again focused on the beholder. View quote
Eric Kandel
The Modernist reaction to the Enlightenment came in the aftermath of the Industrial Revolution, whose brutalizing effects revealed that modern life had not become... mathematically perfect... View quote
Eric Kandel
The growth and maintenance of new synaptic terminals makes memory persist. ...The ability to grow new synaptic connections as a result of experience appears to have been conserved throughout evolution. As an example... the cortical maps of the body surface are subject to constant modification in response to changing input from sensory pathways. View quote
Eric Kandel
Five separate pulses of serotonin, designed to simulate five shocks to the tail, strengthened the synaptic connection for days and led to the growth of new synaptic connections... that did involve the synthesis of new protein. View quote
Eric Kandel
Jacques Monod... published a paper entitled "Genetic Regulatory Mechanisms in the Synthesis of Protein." Using bacteria as a model system, they made the remarkable discovery that genes can be regulated-that is, they can be switched on and off like a water faucet. View quote
Eric Kandel
In the Jacob-Monod model, signals from a cell's environment activate regulatory proteins that switch on the genes encoding particular proteins. This led [Philip] Goelet and me to wonder whether the crucial step in switching on long-term memory in sensitization might involve similar signals and similar gene regulatory proteins. View quote
Eric Kandel
CPEB is the first self-propogating form of a prion known to serve a physiological function... perpetuation of synaptic facilitation and memory storage. View quote
Eric Kandel
Science may explain aspects of art but it will not replace the inspiration that art evokes... View quote
Eric Kandel
Mountcastle discovered that tactile sensation is made up of several distinct modalities; for example, touch includes... hard pressure on the skin as well as a light brush... He found that each distinct submodality has its own private pathway within the brain and that this segregation is maintained at each relay... (Eric Kandel)
The idea that we are unaware of much of out mental life, first developed by Hermann Helmholtz, is central to psychoanalysis. Freud has added the interesting idea that although we are not aware of most instances of mental processing, we can gain conscious access... by paying attention. View quote
Eric Kandel
The brain is a complex biological organ of great computational capability that constructs our sensory experiences, regulates our thoughts and emotions, and control our actions. View quote
Eric Kandel
One of the wonderful things about Internet is its like a salon. It brings people together from different intellectual walks of life. View quote
Eric Kandel
The Age of Insight is a product of my subsequent fascination with the intellectual history of Vienna from 1890 to 1918, as well as my interest in Austrian modernist art, psychoanalysis, art history, and the brain science that is my life's work. In this book I examine the ongoing dialogue between art and science that had its origins in fin-de-siècle Vienna... View quote
Eric Kandel
This dialogue between the ongoing research in brain science and art continue to this day. ...Such dialogues could help us explore the mechanisms in the brain that make perception and creativity possible, whether in art, the sciences, the humanities, or everyday life. In a larger sense, this dialogue could help make science part of our everyday experience. View quote
Eric Kandel
Pernkopf was only one of many Austrians who were "rehabilitated" in the postwar period. Their rehabilitation underscores the tendency of Austria to forget, suppress, and deny the events of the Nazi period. ...Anton Pelinka ...has called this phenomenon the "great Austrian taboo." It is precisely this moral vacuum that induced Simon Wiesenthal to establish his documentation center for Nazi war crimes in Austria, not Germany. View quote
Eric Kandel
Once I have gotten into a problem, I find it extremely helpful to get a complete perspective, to learn what earlier scientists thought about it. I want to see not only what lines of thought proved to be productive, but also where and why certain other directions proved to be unproductive. View quote
Eric Kandel
I was very much influenced by the psychology of Freud and by early workers in the field of learning and memory-James, Thorndike, Pavlov, Skinner, and Ulric Neisser. Their thinking, and even their errors, provided a wonderfully rich cultural background for my later work. View quote
Eric Kandel
The overarching ideas that have influenced my work and fueled my interest in conscious and unconscious memory derive from a perspective on mind that psychiatry and psychoanalysis opened up for me. View quote
Eric Kandel
Each sensory system first analyzes and deconstructs, then restructures the raw, incoming information to its own built-in connections and rules-shades of Immanuel Kant. (Eric Kandel)
Much as Leonardo da Vinci and other Renaissance artists used the revelations of human anatomy to help them depict the body more accurately and compellingly, so, too, many contemporary artists may create new forms of representation in response to revelations about how the brain works. View quote
Eric Kandel
As knowledge advances and scientific disciplines change, so do the disciplines impinging on them. View quote
Eric Kandel
We did not realize that the hippocampus is concerned with perception of the environment and therefore represents multisensory experience... View quote
Eric Kandel
The intellectual life of turn-of-the-century Vienna is in my blood: my heart beats in three-quarter time. View quote
Eric Kandel