Eric R. Kandel: Brain

“What strategy does the brain use to read itself out?”

Eric R. Kandel

In Search of Memory (2006)
Context: 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.

Reading

“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 R. Kandel

The Age of Insight (2012)

Help

“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 R. Kandel

In Search of Memory (2006)

Color

“The Age of Insight is a product of my subsequent fascination with the intellectual history of Vienna from 1890 to 1918, as well as my interest in Austrian modernist art, psychoanalysis, art history, and the brain science that is my life's work. In this book I examine the ongoing dialogue between art and science that had its origins in fin-de-siècle Vienna…”

Eric R. Kandel

The Age of Insight (2012)
Variant: The Age of Insight is a product of my subsequent fascination with the intellectual history of Vienna from 1890 to 1918, as well as my interest in Austrian modernist art, psychoanalysis, art history, and the brain science that is my life's work. In this book I examine the ongoing dialogue between art and science that had its origins in fin-de-siècle Vienna...

Life , Age , Art , History

“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 R. Kandel

The Age of Insight (2012)

Life , Art , Sense , Science

“For some representations of space the brain typically uses egocentric coordinates (centered on the receiver)… For other behaviors… the brain uses allocentric coordinates”

Eric R. Kandel

centered on the world
In Search of Memory (2006)

World , Behavior

“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 R. Kandel

The Age of Insight (2012)

Feeling , Nature

“We now understand that every mental state and every mental disorder is a disorder of brain function. Treatments work by altering the structure and function of the brain.”

Eric R. Kandel

In Search of Memory (2006)

Understanding

“Recall of memory is a creative process. What the brain stores is… only a core memory. Upon recall, this memory is then elaborated upon and reconstructed, with subtractions, additions, elaborations, and distortions.”

Eric R. Kandel

In Search of Memory (2006)

Memory

“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 R. Kandel

In Search of Memory (2006)
Context: 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.

Fate , Behavior

“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 R. Kandel

In Search of Memory (2006)

Light

“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 R. Kandel

In Search of Memory (2006)

Understanding

“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 R. Kandel

In Search of Memory (2006)

Idea , Knowledge , Loss