Eric Kandel quotes - page 3

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:

Exceptionally good memory exhibited by some people may stem from genetic differences in CREB-2 that limit the activity of this repressor protein in relation to CREB-1.

Eric Kandel

The same CREB switch is important for many forms of implicit memory in a variety of other species, from bees to mice to people.

Eric Kandel

Implicit memory is responsible not only for simple perceptual and motor skills but also, in principle, for the pirouettes of Margot Fonteyn, the trumpeting techniques of Wynton Marsalis, the accurate ground strokes of Andre Agassi, and the leg movements of an adolescent. Implicit memory guides us through well-established routines that are not consciously controlled.

Eric Kandel

Aspects of visual perception-motion, depth, form, and color-are segregated from one another and conveyed in separate pathways in the brain, where they are brought together and coordinated into a unified perception.

Eric Kandel

Long-term potentiation helps stabalize the internal representation of space, and... attention, a defining feature of explicit memory storage, modulates the representation of space.

Eric Kandel

For some representations of space the brain typically uses egocentric coordinates (centered on the receiver)... For other behaviors... the brain uses allocentric coordinates (centered on the world).

Eric Kandel

I was astonished to discover that working in the laboratory-doing science in collaboration with interesting and creative people-is dramatically different from taking courses and reading about science.

Eric Kandel

We now understand that every mental state and every mental disorder is a disorder of brain function. Treatments work by altering the structure and function of the brain.

Eric Kandel

Nothing is more stimulating for self-education than working in a new area.

Eric Kandel

The portraits of the Viennese modernists, with their conscious and dramatic attempts to depict their subject's inner feelings, represent an ideal example of how psychological and biological insights can enrich our relationship with art.

Eric Kandel

One of the characteristic features of Viennese life at this time was the continual, easy interaction of artists, writers, and thinkers with scientists.

Eric Kandel

The function of the modern artist was not to convey beauty, but to convey new truths.

Eric Kandel

As the art historian Emily Braun has documented, Klimt read Darwin and became fascinated with the structure of the cell... Thus, the small iconographic images on Adelle's dress are not simply decorative... they are symbols of male and female cells: rectangular sperm and ovoid eggs. ...designed to match the sitter's seductive face and her full-blown reproductive capacities.

Eric Kandel

In Vienna, Modernism had three main characteristics. The first was the new view of the human mind as being largely irrational by nature. ...they questioned what constitutes reality, what lies below the surface appearances of people, objects, and events. ...They discovered that ...people harbor not only unconscious erotic feelings, but also unconscious aggressive impulses that are directed against themselves as well as against others. Freud later called these dark impulses the death instinct.

Eric Kandel

The remarkable insight that characterized Klimt's later work was contemporaneous with Freud's psychological studies and presaged the inward turn that would pervade all fields of inquiry.

Eric Kandel

As you know, in most areas of science, there are long periods of beginning before we really make progress.

Eric Kandel

Life is sort of a circle. You come back to a lot of the interests that you had early in life.

Eric Kandel

In art, as in science, reductionism does not trivialize our perception - of color, light, and perspective - but allows us to see each of these components in a new way.

Eric Kandel

I went to medical school after having decided to do so somewhere between my junior and senior year at Harvard - very late. I initially wanted to be an intellectual historian.

Eric Kandel

The biology of mind bridges the sciences - concerned with the natural world - and the humanities - concerned with the meaning of human experience.

Eric Kandel

One of the ultimate challenges for biology is to understand the brain's processing of unconscious and conscious perception, emotion, and empathy.

Eric Kandel

It spawned an ongoing pursuit to link these disciplines.

Eric Kandel