Eric Kandel Quotes

39 quotes in 675 categories

• The brain is a complex biological organ of great computational capability that constructs our sensory experiences, regulates our thoughts and emotions, and control our actions.
• It is this potential for plasticity of the relatively stereotyped units of the nervous system that endows each of us with our individuality.
• Memory is everything. Without it we are nothing,
• The task of neural science is to explain behaviour in terms of the activities of the brain. How does the brain marshall its millions of…
• Has it ever struck you ... that life is all memory, except for the one present moment that goes by you so quickly you hardly…
• There was little in my early life to indicate that an interest in biology would become the passion of my academic career. In fact, there…
• I was born in Vienna on November 7, 1929, eleven years after the multiethnic Austro-Hungarian Empire fell apart following its defeat in World War I.
• My parents genuinely loved Vienna, and in later years I learned from them why the city exerted a powerful hold on them and other Jews.…
• My parents were not born in Vienna, but they had spent much of their lives there, having each come to the city at the beginning…
• In the 1950s and early 1960s, psychoanalysis swept through the intellectual community, and it was the dominant mode of thinking about the mind. People felt…
• The problem of psychoanalysis is not the body of theory that Freud left behind, but the fact that it never became a medical science. It…
• Long-term memory involves enduring changes that result from the growth of new synaptic connections.
• You could double the number of synaptic connections in a very simple neurocircuit as a result of experience and learning. The reason for that was…
• I was interested in the nature of human mental processes, which is what got me interested in psychoanalysis. And it became clear to me after…
• I like problems at the borders of disciplines. One of the reasons that neurobiology of learning and memory appeal to me so much was that…
• I was reluctant to be critical of the United States because I thought the United States could do no wrong; that the government could not…
• In order to produce learned fear, you take a neutral stimulus like a tone, and you pair it with an electrical shock. Tone, shock. Tone,…
• What the Ellison Foundation and I are hoping to encourage is a more holistic approach to psychiatry, in which psychotherapy is put on as rigorous…
• Rather than studying the most complex form of memory in a very complicated animal, we had to take the most simple form - an implicit…
• Nerve cells communicate with one another at specialized points called synapses. And these synapses are plastic - they can be modified by learning.

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