Eric Kandel Quotes

78 Sourced Quotes

The Age of Insight is a product of my... 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.... I examine the ongoing dialogue between art and science that had its origins in fin-de-siècle Vienna and document its three major phases.

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 intellectual life of turn-of-the-century Vienna is in my blood: my heart beats in three-quarter time.

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)...

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
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.

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.

Eric Kandel
Jacob and Monod not only outlined a theory of gene regulation, they also discovered the first regulators of gene transcription. These regulators come in two forms—repressors, genes that encode the regulatory proteins that shut genes off, and as later work showed, activators, genes that encode the regulatory proteins that turn genes on.

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
The Copernican revolution... revealed that the earth is not the center of the universe... The second, the Darwinian revolution... revealed that we are not created divinely or uniquely but instead evolved from simpler animals by a process of natural selection. The third great revolution, the Freudian revolution of Vienna 1900, revealed that we do not consciously control our own actions but are instead driven by unconscious motives. This... later led to the idea that human creativity... stems from conscious access to underlying, unconscious forces.

Eric Kandel
Cori Bargmann... has studied two variants of C. elegans... The only difference between the two is one amino acid in an otherwise shared receptor protein. Transferring the receptor from a social worm to a solitary worm makes the solitary worm social.

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.

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

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.

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
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.

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.

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.

Eric Kandel
The history of Austrian culture and scholarship in the modern era largely paralleled the history of Austrian Jewry.

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
I continue to explore the science in which I work almost like a child, with naïve joy, curiosity, and amazement.

Eric Kandel
Birds in which spatial memory is particularly important—those that store food at a large number of sites, for example—have larger hippocampuses than other birds.... London taxi drivers have a larger hippocampus than others the same age.... the size of their hippocampus continues to increase with time on the job.

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
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.

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

Eric Kandel