Eric Kandel Quotes

The Vienna School of Art History, influenced in part by Sigmund Freud's psychological work, began to develop a science-based psychology of art that was initially focused on the beholder. Today, the new science of mind has... again focused on the beholder.

The function of the modern artist was not to convey beauty, but to convey new truths.

One of the characteristic features of Viennese life at this time was the continual, easy interaction of artists, writers, and thinkers with scientists.

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.

This dialogue between the ongoing research in brain science and art continue to this day. ...Such dialogues could help us explore the mechanisms in the brain that make perception and creativity possible, whether in art, the sciences, the humanities, or everyday life. In a larger sense, this dialogue could help make science part of our everyday experience.

The Age of Insight is a product of my subsequent fascination with the intellectual history of Vienna from 1890 to 1918, as well as my interest in Austrian modernist art, psychoanalysis, art history, and the brain science that is my life's work. In this book I examine the ongoing dialogue between art and science that had its origins in fin-de-siècle Vienna...

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

I entered Harvard to become a historian and left to become a psychoanalyst, only to abandon both... to follow my intuition that the road to a real understanding of mind must pass through the cellular pathways of the brain.

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.

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

I was very much influenced by the psychology of Freud and by early workers in the field of learning and memory—James, Thorndike, Pavlov, Skinner, and Ulric Neisser. Their thinking, and even their errors, provided a wonderfully rich cultural background for my later work.

Once I have gotten into a problem, I find it extremely helpful to get a complete perspective, to learn what earlier scientists thought about it. I want to see not only what lines of thought proved to be productive, but also where and why certain other directions proved to be unproductive.

It is much more meaningful and enjoyable to read the scientific literature about experiments you are involved in yourself than to read about science in the abstract.

The overarching ideas that have influenced my work and fueled my interest in conscious and unconscious memory derive from a perspective on mind that psychiatry and psychoanalysis opened up for me.

Giacomo Rizzolatti... calls these "mirror neurons" and suggests that they provide the first insight into imitation, identification, empathy, and possibly the ability to mime vocalization—the mental processes intrinsic to human interaction. Vilayanur Ramachandran has found evidence of comparable neurons in the premotor cortex of people. ...one can see a whole new area of biology opening up... that can give us a sense of what makes us social, communicating beings. An ambitious undertaking of this sort might... teach us something about the factors that give rise to tribalism, which is so often associated with fear, hatred, and intolerance of outsiders.