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 wa… - Eric Kandel

The Modernist reaction to the Enlightenment came in the aftermath of the Industrial Revolution, whose brutalizing effects revealed that modern life had not become... mathematically perfect...

The realization that our mental functioning is largely irrational was arrived at by several thinkers at the same time, including Friedrich Nietzsche... Freud, who was much influenced by both Darwin and Nietzsche... was its most profound and articulate exponent. ...Schnitzler, Klimt, Kokoschka, and Schiele also discovered and explored new aspects of our unconscious mental life. They understood women better than Freud... and they saw more clearly than Freud the importance of an infant's bonding to its mother. They even realized the significance of the aggressive instinct earlier than Freud did. ...Plato discussed unconscious knowledge ...pointing out that much of our knowledge is inherent in the psyche in latent form. ...Hermann von Helmholtz... advanced the idea that the unconscious plays a critical role in human visual perception.

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