Eric Kandel - In Search of Memory (2006)

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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
I continue to explore the science in which I work almost like a child, with naïve joy, curiosity, and amazement.

Eric Kandel
Implicit memory is responsible not only for simple perceptual and motor skills but also, in principle, for the pirouettes of Margot Fonteyn, the trumpeting techniques of Wynton Marsalis, the accurate ground strokes of Andre Agassi, and the leg movements of an adolescent. Implicit memory guides us through well-established routines that are not consciously controlled.

Eric Kandel
The history of Austrian culture and scholarship in the modern era largely paralleled the history of Austrian Jewry.

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
Jacques Monod... published a paper entitled "Genetic Regulatory Mechanisms in the Synthesis of Protein." Using bacteria as a model system, they made the remarkable discovery that genes can be regulated—that is, they can be switched on and off like a water faucet.

Eric Kandel
It is much more meaningful and enjoyable to read the scientific literature about experiments you are involved in yourself than to read about science in the abstract.

Eric Kandel
I was astonished to discover that working in the laboratory—doing science in collaboration with interesting and creative people—is dramatically different from taking courses and reading about science.

Eric Kandel
The fact that a gene must be switched on to form a long-term memory shows clearly that genes are not simply determinants of behavior but are also responsive to environmental stimulation, such as learning.

Eric Kandel
Cori Bargmann... has studied two variants of C. elegans... The only difference between the two is one amino acid in an otherwise shared receptor protein. Transferring the receptor from a social worm to a solitary worm makes the solitary worm social.

Eric Kandel
Long-term potentiation helps stabalize the internal representation of space, and... attention, a defining feature of explicit memory storage, modulates the representation of space.

Eric Kandel
Jacob and Monod not only outlined a theory of gene regulation, they also discovered the first regulators of gene transcription. These regulators come in two forms—repressors, genes that encode the regulatory proteins that shut genes off, and as later work showed, activators, genes that encode the regulatory proteins that turn genes on.

Eric Kandel
Pernkopf was only one of many Austrians who were "rehabilitated" in the postwar period. Their rehabilitation underscores the tendency of Austria to forget, suppress, and deny the events of the Nazi period.... Anton Pelinka... has called this phenomenon the "great Austrian taboo." It is precisely this moral vacuum that induced Simon Wiesenthal to establish his documentation center for Nazi war crimes in Austria, not Germany.

Eric Kandel
I was very much influenced by the psychology of Freud and by early workers in the field of learning and memory—James, Thorndike, Pavlov, Skinner, and Ulric Neisser. Their thinking, and even their errors, provided a wonderfully rich cultural background for my later work.

Eric Kandel
Birds in which spatial memory is particularly important—those that store food at a large number of sites, for example—have larger hippocampuses than other birds.... London taxi drivers have a larger hippocampus than others the same age.... the size of their hippocampus continues to increase with time on the job.

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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
My hope is that the difference in the three generations' attitudes may signal a lessening of anti-Semitism in Austria.

Eric Kandel
Exceptionally good memory exhibited by some people may stem from genetic differences in CREB-2 that limit the activity of this repressor protein in relation to CREB-1.

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

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

Eric Kandel