Eric Kandel Quotes

78 Sourced Quotes

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.

Eric Kandel
CREB's opposing regulatory actions provide a threshold for memory storage, presumably to ensure that only important, life-serving experiences are learned. Repeated shocks to the tail are a significant learning experience for an Aplysia, just as, say, practicing the piano or conjugating French verbs are to us: practice makes perfect, repetition is necessary for long-term memory. In principle, however, a highly emotional state... could bypass the normal restraints on long-term memory. In such a situation, enough MAP kinase molecules would be sent into the nucleus rapidly enough to inactivate all of the CREB-2 molecules, thereby making it easy for protein kinase A to activate CREB-1 and put the experience directly into long-term memory.

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.

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
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
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.

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.

Eric Kandel
Even though I had long been taught that the genes of the brain are the governors of behavior, the absolute masters of our fate, our work showed that, in the brain as in bacteria, genes are also servants of the environment.... An environmental stimulus... activates modulatory interneurons that release serotonin. The serotonin acts on the sensory neuron to increase cyclic AMP and to cause protein kinase A and MAP kinase to move to the nucleus and activate CREB. The activation of CREB, in turn, leads to the expression of genes that changes the function and the structure of the cell.

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
The Viennese Kultusgemeinde... was going bankrupt... European governments typically compensate Jewish agencies... but the Austrian government's compensation was not adequate.... I owe my existence in the United States to the generosity of the Viennese Kultusgemeinde.

Eric Kandel
What strategy does the brain use to read itself out? That question, which is central to the unitary nature of conscious experience, remains one of the many unresolved mysteries of the new science of mind.

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.

Eric Kandel
We did not realize that the hippocampus is concerned with perception of the environment and therefore represents multisensory experience...

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
By merely observing the electrical activity in the brain, Libet could predict what a person would do before the person was actually aware of having decided to do it. This finding caused philosophers of mind to ask: If the choice is determined in the brain before we decide to act, where is free will?... choice in action, as in perception, may reflect the importance of unconscious inference. Libet proposes that... just before the action is initiated, consciousness is recruited to approve or veto the action.

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.

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.

Eric Kandel
I have at times felt alone, uncertain, without a well-trodden path to follow. Every time I embarked on a new course, there were well-meaning people... who advised against it. I had to learn early on to be comfortable with insecurity and to trust my own judgement on key issues.

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.

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?

Eric Kandel
Like other modern artists faced with the advent of the photography, Klimpt sought newer truths that could not be captured by the camera. He... turned the artists view inward—away from the three-dimensional outside world and toward the multidimensional inner self and the unconscious mind.

Eric Kandel
What biological processes enable me to review my own history with such emotional vividness?

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
... 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.

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.

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.

Eric Kandel
Science may explain aspects of art but it will not replace the inspiration that art evokes...

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.

Eric Kandel
As knowledge advances and scientific disciplines change, so do the disciplines impinging on them.

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.

Eric Kandel