Eric Kandel Quotes

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.

The life of a biological scientist in the United States is a life of discussion and debate—it is the Talmudic tradition writ large. ...The egalitarian structure of American science encourages this camaraderie. ...this would not—could not—have taken place in the Austria, the Germany, the France, or perhaps even the England of 1955.

The portraits of the Viennese modernists, with their conscious and dramatic attempts to depict their subject's inner feelings, represent an ideal example of how psychological and biological insights can enrich our relationship with art.

O'Keefe... argued that many forms of explicit memory (for example, memory for people and objects) use spatial coordinates... we typically remember people and events in a spatial context.

Having been trained in history and the humanities, where one learns early on how depressing life can be, I am delighted to have ultimately switched to biology, where a delusional optimism still abounds.