Eric Kandel Quotes

Modernism in Vienna brought together science and culture in a new way to create an Age of Insight that emphasized a more complex view of the human mind than had ever existed before.

I have a philosophy that has guided me throughout all of my scientific career, and that is, I think of myself as a fairly thoughtful person. I don’t go into projects impetuously, and I try to select important problems.

Psychoanalysis has a degree of unreliability about it. You will never know whether you‘ve found the truth. You may find a subjective truth, but you don’t know.

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 that long-term memory alters the expression of genes in nerve cells, which is the cause of the growth of new synaptic connections.

The brain is a complex biological organ possessing immense computational capability: it constructs our sensory experience, regulates our thoughts and emotions, and controls our actions.

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.

Since Socrates and Plato first speculated on the nature of the human mind, serious thinkers through the ages – from Aristotle to Descartes, from Aeschylus to Strindberg and Ingmar Bergman – have thought it wise to understand oneself and one’s behavior.

I found working in the lab is so completely different than reading a textbook about it. You know, you’re planning strategies; you’re working with your own hands. There’s essential satisfaction in running experiments.

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 never tried to test its ideas.

You learn emotional experiences as much as you learn cognitive experiences, except that they are more unconscious. Sometimes one represses the cognitive component of it, but it’s often more difficult to repress the emotional component.

Early in my career, I was disappointed that psychoanalysis was not becoming more empirical, was not becoming more scientific. It was primarily concerned with individual patients. It wasn’t trying to collect data from large groups of people who have been analyzed.

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

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 a while that mental processes come from the brain, and in order to understand them, you need to be a biologist of the brain.

One can, in principle, outline sort of a set of neural circuits that are critically involved and even identify disorders that affect different components of that neural circuit and see what happens if you knock out, for example, inability to recognize faces, how it affects your response to portraiture.

Nerve cells communicate with one another at specialized points called synapses. And these synapses are plastic – they can be modified by learning.

My heart beats in three-quarter time.

I’ve been collecting art for much of my adult life. I started around 1960. And my wife and I really enjoy art a great deal. We don’t have a lot of money, so we have works on paper, but we enjoy them a great deal.

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

Rather than studying the most complex form of memory in a very complicated animal, we had to take the most simple form – an implicit form of memory – in a very simple animal. So I began to look around for very simple animals. And I focused in on the marine snail Aplysia.

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 a level as psychopharmacology.

When I was a medical student in the 1950s, we practically never spoke about Alzheimer‘s disease. And why is that so? And that is because people didn’t live long enough to have Alzheimer’s disease.

I’ve been around a long time, and I’ve been interested in memory for a long time. And one of my earlier interests in molecular biology of memory led me to define the switch that converts short term to long term memory.

Ever since the Enlightenment, people thought that we were living in a rational universe. They thought that God was a mathematician and that the function of the scientist was to figure out the mathematical rules whereby the universe was created.

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.

A brain scan may reveal the neural signs of anxiety, but a Kokoschka painting, or a Schiele self-portrait, reveals what an anxiety state really feels like. Both perspectives are necessary if we are to fully grasp the nature of the mind, yet they are rarely brought together.

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 was little to suggest I would have an academic career.

Long-term memory involves enduring changes that result from the growth of new synaptic connections.

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

If you have a lesion in the hippocampus in both sides, you have short term memory, but you can convert that short term memory into long term memory.

Memory has always fascinated me. Think of it. You can recall at will your first day in high school, your first date, your first love.