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 un… - Eric Kandel

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.

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