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The intellectual life of turn-of-the-century Vienna is in my blood: my heart beats in three-quarter time.
Eric Kandel
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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.
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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.
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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
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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
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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.
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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We did not realize that the hippocampus is concerned with perception of the environment and therefore represents multisensory experience...
Eric Kandel
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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.
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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
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Quote of the day
Time and trouble will tame an advanced young woman, but an advanced old woman is uncontrollable by any earthly force.
Dorothy L. Sayers
Eric Kandel
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Born:
November 7, 1929
(age 94)
Bio:
Eric Richard Kandel is an American neuropsychiatrist and recipient of the 2000 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, shared with Arvid Carlsson and Paul Greengard. His research entails the physiological basis of memory storage in neurons.
Known for:
Principles of Neural Science (1981)
In Search of Memory (2006)
Essentials of Neural Science and Behavior (1995)
Most used words:
memory
brain
genes
science
art
life
mind
people
regulatory
sensory
work
proteins
creb
perception
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