Eric Kandel - Mind Quotes

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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
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
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
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
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
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
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
I entered Harvard to become a historian and left to become a psychoanalyst, only to abandon both... to follow my intuition that the road to a real understanding of mind must pass through the cellular pathways of the brain.

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
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
A brain scan may reveal the neural signs of depression, but a Beethoven symphony reveals what that depression feels like. Both perspectives are necessary if we are to fully grasp the nature of mind, yet they are rarely brought together.

Eric Kandel