Eric Kandel Quotes (1929-)

“The Modernist reaction to the Enlightenment came in the aftermath of the Industrial Revolution, whose brutalizing effects revealed that modern life had not become... mathematically perfect...”

“Giacomo Rizzolatti... calls these "mirror neurons" and suggests that they provide the first insight into imitation, identification, empathy, and possibly the ability to mime vocalization—the mental processes intrinsic to human interaction. Vilayanur Ramachandran has found evidence of comparable neurons in the premotor cortex of people. ...one can see a whole new area of biology opening up... that can give us a sense of what makes us social, communicating beings. An ambitious undertaking of this sort might... teach us something about the factors that give rise to tribalism, which is so often associated with fear, hatred, and intolerance of outsiders.”

“Prior to Brenda Milner's discoveries, many behaviorists and some cognitive psychologists had followed the lead of Freud and Skinner and abandoned biology as a useful guide to the study of learning and memory. They had done so not because they were dualists, like Descartes, but because they thought that biology was unlikely to play a significant role in studies of learning in the near future. Indeed, Lashley's influential work made it seem that the biology of learning was essentially incomprehensible. ...Milner's work changed all that. Her discoveries that certain regions of the brain are necessary for some forms of memory provided the first evidence of where different memories are processed and stored. But the question of how memory is stored remained unanswered, and it fascinated me.”

“The Modernist reaction to the Enlightenment came in the aftermath of the Industrial Revolution, whose brutalizing effects revealed that modern life had not become... mathematically perfect...”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“In the near future, neurobiology will address a matter of more general and fundamental importance: the biology of human mental processes. ...Psychology and psychiatry can illuminate and define for biology the mental functions that need to be studied if we are to have a meaningful and sophisticated understanding of the biology of the human mind.”

“The Copernican revolution... revealed that the earth is not the center of the universe... The second, the Darwinian revolution... revealed that we are not created divinely or uniquely but instead evolved from simpler animals by a process of natural selection. 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.”

“René Descartes developed the idea that human beings have a dual nature: they have a body... of material substance, and a mind, which derives from the spiritual nature of the soul. ... It is remarkable to reflect that these seventeenth century ideas were still current in the 1980s. Karl Popper... and John Eccles... espoused dualism all their lives. They agreed with Aquinas that the soul is immortal and independent of the brain. Gilbert Ryle... referred to the notion of the soul as "the ghost in the machine." Today, most philosophers of mind agree that what we call consciousness derives from the physical brain, but some disagree with Crick as to whether it can ever be approached scientifically. A few, such as Colin McGinn, believe that consciousness cannot be studied... At the other extreme, philosophers such as Daniel Dennett deny that there is any problem at all. Dennett argues much as... John Hughlings Jackson did... that consciousness is not a distinct operation of the brain; rather it is a combined result of computational workings of higher-order areas of the brain... Philosophers such as John Searle and Thomas Nagel take a middle position, holding that consciousness is a discrete set of biological processes... very complex and... more than the sum of their parts.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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 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.”

“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.”

“In the early 1960s, Kandel made the bold decision to conduct research on an unlikely animal, the large sea snail Aplysia californica. Kandel found this invertebrate attractive for neuroscience research because it has fewer and larger neurons than more traditional laboratory animals. This simple neural system would subsequently serve as an invaluable model for understanding the cellular basis of learning.”