Eric Kandel Quotes

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

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).

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.

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.

Long-term potentiation helps stabalize the internal representation of space, and... attention, a defining feature of explicit memory storage, modulates the representation of space.

Birds in which spatial memory is particularly important—those that store food at a large number of sites, for example—have larger hippocampuses than other birds. ...London taxi drivers have a larger hippocampus than others the same age. ...the size of their hippocampus continues to increase with time on the job.

The firing of individual nerve cells involved in perceptual and motor processing is modified by attention and decision making.

What strategy does the brain use to read itself out? That question, which is central to the unitary nature of conscious experience, remains one of the many unresolved mysteries of the new science of mind.

The idea that different aspects of visual perception might be handled in separate areas of the brain was predicted by Freud at the end of the nineteenth century. ...a cortical defect that affected [the] ability to combine aspects of vision into a meaningful pattern. ...defects, which Freud called agnosias (loss of knowledge)...

Segregation occurs in the primary visual area of the cortex, which gives rise to two parallel pathways. ...the "what" pathway, carries information about the form of an object... the "where" pathway, carries information about the movement of the object in space: where the object is located.

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.

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.

Cajal revealed the precision of the interconnections between populations of individual nerve cells. Mountcastle, Hubel, and Wiesel revealed the functional significance of those patterns of interconnections. They showed that the connections filter and transform sensory information on the way to and within the cortex, and that the cortex is organized into functional compartments, or modules.

Mountcastle discovered that tactile sensation is made up of several distinct modalities; for example, touch includes... hard pressure on the skin as well as a light brush... He found that each distinct submodality has its own private pathway within the brain and that this segregation is maintained at each relay...

What biological processes enable me to review my own history with such emotional vividness?