Eric Kandel Quotes

• Has it ever struck you ... that life is all memory, except for the one present moment that goes by you so quickly you hardly catch it going? It’s really all memory ... except for each passing moment.

  Eric Kandel

  Inspirational, Life, Time

  106 Copy quote

• Memory is everything. Without it we are nothing.

  Eric Kandel

  Memories

  34 Copy quote

• Truth has many dimensions, and the way you arrive at truth in complex situations is through many perspectives.

  Eric Kandel

  Perspective, Way, Dimensions

  Source: www.spiegel.de

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• 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.

  Eric Kandel

  Brain, Our Actions, Emotion

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• 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 individual nerve cells to produce behaviour, and how are these cells influenced by the environment...? The last frontier of the biological sciences – their ultimate challenge – is to understand the biological basis of consciousness and the mental processes by which we perceive, act, learn, and remember.

  Eric Kandel

  Cells, Challenges, Brain

  29 Copy quote

• As you know, in most areas of science, there are long periods of beginning before we really make progress.

  Eric Kandel

  Long, Progress, Periods

  "Art, Mind And Brain Intersect In Kandel's Vienna". "Science Friday" with Ira Flatow, www.npr.org. March 30, 2012.

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• I see psychoanalysis, art and biology ultimately coming together, just like cognitive psychology and neuroscience have merged.

  Eric Kandel

  Art, Psychology, Together

  Source: www.spiegel.de

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• Life is sort of a circle. You come back to a lot of the interests that you had early in life.

  Eric Kandel

  Circles, Life Is, Interest

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• In art, as in science, reductionism does not trivialize our perception - of color, light, and perspective - but allows us to see each of these components in a new way.

  Eric Kandel

  Art, Light, Color

  Eric Kandel (2012). “The Age of Insight: The Quest to Understand the Unconscious in Art, Mind, and Brain, from Vienna 1900 to the Present”, p.508, Random House

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• It is this potential for plasticity of the relatively stereotyped units of the nervous system that endows each of us with our individuality.

  Eric Kandel

  Individuality, Nervous, Units

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• I don't think biology is replacing the feeling experienced through art. Biology is capable of giving additional insights. It's a parallel, not a substitutive process.

  Eric Kandel

  Art, Thinking, Giving

  Source: www.spiegel.de

  26 Copy quote

• Biology is a way of approaching the truth about the mind. In biology most people don't tackle problems at the level of complexity that psychoanalysis does. But psychoanalysis has a degree of uncertainty about it. A psychoanalyst may have some deep insights, but cannot, at the moment, run experiments to establish whether it's really the truth.

  Eric Kandel

  Running, People, Mind

  Source: www.spiegel.de

  21 Copy quote

• There are cells in the brain that respond to faces. This is one of the reasons that I deal with portraiture. We can learn a lot about our perception of facial expression from the behavior of these cells.

  Eric Kandel

  Cells, Expression, Perception

  Source: www.spiegel.de

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• One of the wonderful things about Internet is its like a salon. It brings people together from different intellectual walks of life.

  Eric Kandel

  People, Intellectual, Together

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• There was an idea that God created man different from other animals, because man was rational and animals had drives and instincts. That idea of a rational man that was specially created went out the window when Darwin showed that we evolved from animal ancestors, that we have instincts, much as do animals, and that our instincts are very important. It was a much more sophisticated, nuanced, and rich view of the human mind.

  Eric Kandel

  Men, Animal, Ideas

  Source: www.spiegel.de

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• Self-portraits are a way of revealing something about oneself.

  Eric Kandel

  Self, Portraits, Revealing Something

  Source: www.spiegel.de

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• I have on the one hand a hatred and on the other a yearning for Vienna. I left when I was nine years old because I was Jewish. And even before 1938, the anti-Semitism in Austria was probably deeper than it was in Germany or in other European countries.

  Eric Kandel

  Country, Hands, Years

  Source: www.spiegel.de

  23 Copy quote

• Not only Freud but artists and writers were also interested in the unconscious. It was medicine that made the first steps toward modernity.

  Eric Kandel

  Artist, Medicine, Steps

  Source: www.spiegel.de

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• I really like the city of Vienna. I like its art, its music and its architecture. In short, I like the culture that Vienna represents. What really captures me is the period around 1900 - the time of Freud, Schnitzler and Klimt. This is the period in which the modern view of mind was born.

  Eric Kandel

  Art, Views, Cities

  Source: www.spiegel.de

  65 Copy quote

• The problem for many people is that we cannot point to the underlying biological bases of most psychiatric disorders. In fact, we are nowhere near understanding them as well as we understand disorders of the liver or the heart.

  Eric Kandel

  Heart, People, Understanding

  8 Copy quote

• Vienna is relatively small. And it had wonderful salons, opportunities for people to get together. There was a lot of interaction between scientists and non-scientists, between Jews and non-Jews, between artists, writers and scientists, including medical scientists.

  Eric Kandel

  Artist, Opportunity, People

  Source: www.spiegel.de

  12 Copy quote

• I went to medical school after having decided to do so somewhere between my junior and senior year at Harvard - very late. I initially wanted to be an intellectual historian.

  Eric Kandel

  Senior, School, Years

  "A Nobel Prize with help from sea slugs". Interview with Edythe McNamee and Jacque Wilson, www.cnn.com. May 14, 2013.

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• After the war, the Austrians just denied their role in it all. They didn't teach it in school. But since 1990 they have openly acknowledged their role in the Holocaust and I feel more comfortable in Austria. I feel a sort of reconciliation.

  Eric Kandel

  War, School, Holocaust

  Source: www.spiegel.de

  8 Copy quote

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