Eric Kandel Quotes

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Eric Kandel

Profession : Scientist

Birth : November 7, 1929

The biology of mind bridges the sciences - concerned with the natural world - and the humanities - concerned with the meaning of human experience.

Eric Kandel

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.

Eric Kandel

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.

Eric Kandel

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

Eric Kandel

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.

Eric Kandel

My heart beats in three-quarter time.

Eric Kandel

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.

Eric Kandel

One of the ultimate challenges for biology is to understand the brain's processing of unconscious and conscious perception, emotion, and empathy.

Eric Kandel

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.

Eric Kandel

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.

Eric Kandel

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 of World War I when they were still very young.

Eric Kandel

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.

Eric Kandel

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.

Eric Kandel

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 loved the dialect of Vienna, its cultural sophistication, and artistic values.

Eric Kandel

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.

Eric Kandel

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.

Eric Kandel

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.

Eric Kandel

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 that this was a completely new set of insights into human motivation, and that its therapeutic potential was significant.

Eric Kandel

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.

Eric Kandel

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.

Eric Kandel