Eric Kandel quotes - page 4

Klimt sought newer truths that could not be captured by the camera. He... turned the artists view inward. (Eric Kandel)
Libet could predict what a person would do before the person was actually aware of having decided to do it.
Eric Kandel
What strategy does the brain use to read itself out?
Eric Kandel
Every time I embarked on a new course, there were well-meaning people... who advised against it.
Eric Kandel
London taxi drivers have a larger hippocampus.
Eric Kandel
I owe my existence in the United States to the generosity of the Viennese Kultusgemeinde.
Eric Kandel
As astronomy and physics inspired the Enlightenment, so biology inspired Modernism.
Eric Kandel
Birds in which spatial memory is particularly important.
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.
Eric Kandel
The third great revolution, the Freudian revolution of Vienna 1900, revealed that we do not consciously control our own actions but are instead driven by unconscious motives. This... later led to the idea that human creativity... stems from conscious access to underlying, unconscious forces.
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. (Eric Kandel)
Transferring the receptor from a social worm to a solitary worm makes the solitary worm social.
Eric Kandel
The realization that our mental functioning is largely irrational was arrived at by several thinkers at the same time.
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.
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.
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
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
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
Like other modern artists faced with the advent of the photography, Klimt 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
As astronomy and physics inspired the Enlightenment, so biology inspired Modernism. ...This new view led to a reexamination in art of the biological nature of human existence, as evident in Édouard Manet's Déjeuner sur l'Herbe... Manet's painting... reveals a theme... the complex relationship between the sexes and between fantasy and reality. ...also startlingly modern because of its style. Several decades before Cézanne began to collapse three dimension into two, Manet here had already flattened the viewer's sense of perspective...
Eric Kandel
The realization that our mental functioning is largely irrational was arrived at by several thinkers at the same time, including Friedrich Nietzsche... Freud, who was much influenced by both Darwin and Nietzsche... was its most profound and articulate exponent. ...Schnitzler, Klimt, Kokoschka, and Schiele also discovered and explored new aspects of our unconscious mental life. They understood women better than Freud... and they saw more clearly than Freud the importance of an infant's bonding to its mother. They even realized the significance of the aggressive instinct earlier than Freud did. ...Plato discussed unconscious knowledge ...pointing out that much of our knowledge is inherent in the psyche in latent form. ...Hermann von Helmholtz... advanced the idea that the unconscious plays a critical role in human visual perception. (Eric Kandel)