Eric Kandel citations

Page 2

“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.”

“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.”

“Nothing is more stimulating for self-education than working in a new area.”

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

“In the period from 1920 to 1960, psychiatry derived its main intellectual impetus from psychoanalysis. During this phase, its most powerful antidisciplines were philosophy and the social sciences. Since 1960, psychiatry has begun (again) to derive its main intellectual challenge from biology, with the result that neurobiology has been thrust into the position of the new antidiscipline for psychiatry.”

“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.”

“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.”

“The same CREB switch is important for many forms of implicit memory in a variety of other species, from bees to mice to people.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“The history of Austrian culture and scholarship in the modern era largely paralleled the history of Austrian Jewry.”

“Five separate pulses of serotonin, designed to simulate five shocks to the tail, strengthened the synaptic connection for days and led to the growth of new synaptic connections… that did involve the synthesis of new protein.”

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

“The portraits of the Viennese modernists, with their conscious and dramatic attempts to depict their subject's inner feelings, represent an ideal example of how psychological and biological insights can enrich our relationship with art.”

“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.”

“Segregation occurs in the primary visual area of the cortex, which gives rise to two parallel pathways. …the "what" pathway, carries information about the form of an object… the "where" pathway, carries information about the movement of the object in space: where the object is located.”

“O'Keefe… argued that many forms of explicit memory (for example, memory for people and objects) use spatial coordinates… we typically remember people and events in a spatial context.”

“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.”

“The function of the modern artist was not to convey beauty, but to convey new truths.”

“Reductionism can expand our vision and give us new insights into the nature and creation of art.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“In the Jacob-Monod model, signals from a cell's environment activate regulatory proteins that switch on the genes encoding particular proteins. This led [Philip] Goelet and me to wonder whether the crucial step in switching on long-term memory in sensitization might involve similar signals and similar gene regulatory proteins.”

“CPEB is the first self-propogating form of a prion known to serve a physiological function… perpetuation of synaptic facilitation and memory storage.”