Eric Kandel Quotes

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.

As knowledge advances and scientific disciplines change, so do the disciplines impinging on them.

I continue to explore the science in which I work almost like a child, with naïve joy, curiosity, and amazement.

The intellectual life of turn-of-the-century Vienna is in my blood: my heart beats in three-quarter time.

As the art historian Emily Braun has documented, Klimt read Darwin and became fascinated with the structure of the cell... Thus, the small iconographic images on Adelle's dress are not simply decorative... they are symbols of male and female cells: rectangular sperm and ovoid eggs. ...designed to match the sitter's seductive face and her full-blown reproductive capacities.

Science may explain aspects of art but it will not replace the inspiration that art evokes...

I have at times felt alone, uncertain, without a well-trodden path to follow. Every time I embarked on a new course, there were well-meaning people... who advised against it. I had to learn early on to be comfortable with insecurity and to trust my own judgement on key issues.

Because we do not have a sensory organ dedicated to space, the representation of space is a quintessentially cognitive sensibility: it is the binding problem writ large.

For some representations of space the brain typically uses egocentric coordinates (centered on the receiver)... For other behaviors... the brain uses allocentric coordinates (centered on the world).

The idea that we are unaware of much of out mental life, first developed by Hermann Helmholtz, is central to psychoanalysis. Freud has added the interesting idea that although we are not aware of most instances of mental processing, we can gain conscious access... by paying attention.

We did not realize that the hippocampus is concerned with perception of the environment and therefore represents multisensory experience...

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.

Nothing is more stimulating for self-education than working in a new area.

The Viennese Kultusgemeinde... was going bankrupt... European governments typically compensate Jewish agencies... but the Austrian government's compensation was not adequate. ...I owe my existence in the United States to the generosity of the Viennese Kultusgemeinde.

Aspects of visual perception—motion, depth, form, and color—are segregated from one another and conveyed in separate pathways in the brain, where they are brought together and coordinated into a unified perception.