Eric Kandel - Sensory Quotes

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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.

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
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
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
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
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
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