Eric Kandel Quotes

78 Sourced Quotes

In the Jacob-Monod model, signals from a cell's environment activate regulatory proteins that switch on the genes encoding particular proteins. This led [Philip] Goelet and me to wonder whether the crucial step in switching on long-term memory in sensitization might involve similar signals and similar gene regulatory proteins.

Eric Kandel
Reductionism can expand our vision and give us new insights into the nature and creation of art.

Eric Kandel
The life of a biological scientist in the United States is a life of discussion and debate—it is the Talmudic tradition writ large.... The egalitarian structure of American science encourages this camaraderie.... this would not—could not—have taken place in the Austria, the Germany, the France, or perhaps even the England of 1955.

Eric Kandel
Unlike vision, touch, or smell, which are prewired and based on Kantian a priori knowledge, the spatial map presents us with a new type of representation, one based on a combination of a priori knowledge and learning. The general capability for forming spatial maps is built into the mind, but the particular map is not. Unlike neurons in a sensory system, place cells are not switched on by sensory stimulation. Their collective activity represents the location where the animal thinks it is.

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.

Eric Kandel
As the art historian Emily Braun has documented, Klimpt 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
The Modernist reaction to the Enlightenment came in the aftermath of the Industrial Revolution, whose brutalizing effects revealed that modern life had not become... mathematically perfect...

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.

Eric Kandel
CPEB is the first self-propogating form of a prion known to serve a physiological function... perpetuation of synaptic facilitation and memory storage.

Eric Kandel
This dialogue between the ongoing research in brain science and art continue to this day.... Such dialogues could help us explore the mechanisms in the brain that make perception and creativity possible, whether in art, the sciences, the humanities, or everyday life. In a larger sense, this dialogue could help make science part of our everyday experience.

Eric Kandel
Much as Leonardo da Vinci and other Renaissance artists used the revelations of human anatomy to help them depict the body more accurately and compellingly, so, too, many contemporary artists may create new forms of representation in response to revelations about how the brain works.

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.

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
The remarkable insight that characterized Klimpt's later work was contemporaneous with Freud's psychological studies and presaged the inward turn that would pervade all fields of inquiry in Vienna in 1900. This period... was characterized by the attempt to make a sharp break with the past and to explore new forms of expression in art, architecture, psychology, literature, and music. It spawned an ongoing pursuit to link these disciplines.

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
The firing of individual nerve cells involved in perceptual and motor processing is modified by attention and decision making.

Eric Kandel
I outline in simple terms... our current understanding of the cognitive psychological and neurobiological basis of perception, memory, emotion, empathy, and creativity.... the principles of the viewer's response to art are applicable to all periods of painting.

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.

Eric Kandel