Eric Kandel quotes - page 2

I continue to explore the science in which I work almost like a child, with naïve joy, curiosity, and amazement. (Eric Kandel)
The history of Austrian culture and scholarship in the modern era largely paralleled the history of Austrian Jewry. View quote
Eric Kandel
What biological processes enable me to review my own history with such emotional vividness? View quote
Eric Kandel
Cajal revealed the precision of the interconnections between populations of individual nerve cells. Mountcastle, Hubel, and Wiesel revealed the functional significance of those patterns of interconnections. They showed that the connections filter and transform sensory information on the way to and within the cortex, and that the cortex is organized into functional compartments, or modules. View quote
Eric Kandel
Segregation occurs in the primary visual area of the cortex, which gives rise to two parallel pathways. ...the "what" pathway, carries information about the form of an object... the "where" pathway, carries information about the movement of the object in space: where the object is located. View quote
Eric Kandel
O'Keefe... argued that many forms of explicit memory (for example, memory for people and objects) use spatial coordinates... we typically remember people and events in a spatial context. View quote
Eric Kandel
Reductionism can expand our vision and give us new insights into the nature and creation of art. View quote
Eric Kandel
Because we do not have a sensory organ dedicated to space, the representation of space is a quintessentially cognitive sensibility: it is the binding problem writ large. View quote
Eric Kandel
Recall of memory is a creative process. What the brain stores is... only a core memory. Upon recall, this memory is then elaborated upon and reconstructed, with subtractions, additions, elaborations, and distortions. View quote
Eric Kandel
For all of us, explicit memory makes it possible to leap across space and time and conjure up events and emotional states that have vanished into the past yet somehow continue to live in our minds. View quote
Eric Kandel
Having been trained in history and the humanities, where one learns early on how depressing life can be, I am delighted to have ultimately switched to biology, where a delusional optimism still abounds. (Eric Kandel)
In the near future, neurobiology will address a matter of more general and fundamental importance: the biology of human mental processes. ...Psychology and psychiatry can illuminate and define for biology the mental functions that need to be studied if we are to have a meaningful and sophisticated understanding of the biology of the human mind. View quote
Eric Kandel
Giacomo Rizzolatti... calls these "mirror neurons" and suggests that they provide the first insight into imitation, identification, empathy, and possibly the ability to mime vocalization-the mental processes intrinsic to human interaction. Vilayanur Ramachandran has found evidence of comparable neurons in the premotor cortex of people. ...one can see a whole new area of biology opening up... that can give us a sense of what makes us social, communicating beings. An ambitious undertaking of this sort might... teach us something about the factors that give rise to tribalism, which is so often associated with fear, hatred, and intolerance of outsiders. View quote
Eric Kandel
I would like to develop a reductionist approach to the problem of attention by focusing on how place cells... create an enduring spatial map only when an organism is paying attention to its surroundings. View quote
Eric Kandel
Jacob and Monod found that in bacteria, genes are switched on and off by other genes. This led them to distinguish between effector genes and regulatory genes. Effector genes encode effector proteins... which mediate specific cellular functions. Regulatory genes encode proteins called regulatory proteins, which switch the effector genes on or off. View quote
Eric Kandel
...in various types of organisms, from snails to flies to mice to people. ...learning and memory, as well as synaptic and neuronal plasticity, represent a family of processes that share a common logic and some key components but vary in the details of their molecular mechanisms. View quote
Eric Kandel
Viennese life at the turn of the century provided opportunities in salons and coffeehouses for scientists, writers, and artists to come together in an atmosphere that was at once inspiring, optimistic, and politically engaged. ...science was no longer the narrow and restrictive province of scientists but had become an integral part of Viennese culture. ...a paradigm for how an open dialogue can be achieved. View quote
Eric Kandel
Modernism began in the mid-nineteenth century as a response not only to the restrictions and hypocrisies of everyday life, but also as a reaction to the Enlightenment's emphasis on the rationality of human behavior. ...The founders of the Royal Society thought of God as a mathematician who had designed the universe according to logical and mathematical principles. The role of the scientist-the natural philosopher was to... decipher the codebook that God had used in creating the cosmos. View quote
Eric Kandel
What is learning but a set of sensory signals from the environment, with different forms of learning resulting from different types or patterns of sensory signals? View quote
Eric Kandel
My hope is that the difference in the three generations' attitudes may signal a lessening of anti-Semitism in Austria. View quote
Eric Kandel
The firing of individual nerve cells involved in perceptual and motor processing is modified by attention and decision making. (Eric Kandel)
It is much more meaningful and enjoyable to read the scientific literature about experiments you are involved in yourself than to read about science in the abstract. View quote
Eric Kandel
The idea that different aspects of visual perception might be handled in separate areas of the brain was predicted by Freud at the end of the nineteenth century. ...a cortical defect that affected [the] ability to combine aspects of vision into a meaningful pattern. ...defects, which Freud called agnosias (loss of knowledge)... View quote
Eric Kandel
The fact that a gene must be switched on to form a long-term memory shows clearly that genes are not simply determinants of behavior but are also responsive to environmental stimulation, such as learning. View quote
Eric Kandel
In the period from 1920 to 1960, psychiatry derived its main intellectual impetus from psychoanalysis. During this phase, its most powerful antidisciplines were philosophy and the social sciences. Since 1960, psychiatry has begun (again) to derive its main intellectual challenge from biology, with the result that neurobiology has been thrust into the position of the new antidiscipline for psychiatry. View quote
Eric Kandel