The biology of mind bridges the sciences – concerned with the natural world – and the humanities – concerned with the meaning of human experience. – Eric Kandel
I had many moments of disappointment, despondency, and exhaustion, but I always found that by reading the literature and showing up at my lab looking at the data as they emerged day by day and discussing them with my students and postdoctoral fellows, I would gain a notion of what to do next. – Eric Kandel
You could double the number of synaptic connections in a very simple neurocircuit as a result of experience and learning. The reason for that was that long-term memory alters the expression of genes in nerve cells, which is the cause of the growth of new synaptic connections. – Eric Kandel
Rather than studying the most complex form of memory in a very complicated animal, we had to take the most simple form – an implicit form of memory – in a very simple animal. So I began to look around for very simple animals. And I focused in on the marine snail Aplysia. – Eric Kandel
As you know, in most areas of science, there are long periods of beginning before we really make progress. – Eric Kandel
My parents genuinely loved Vienna, and in later years I learned from them why the city exerted a powerful hold on them and other Jews. My parents loved the dialect of Vienna, its cultural sophistication, and artistic values. – Eric Kandel
In art, as in science, reductionism does not trivialize our perception – of color, light, and perspective – but allows us to see each of these components in a new way. – Eric Kandel
One of the wonderful things about Internet is it’s like a salon. It brings people together from different intellectual walks of life. – Eric Kandel
Carl von Rokitansky is one of the founders of scientific medicine and systematized it, looking at what the clinical symptoms mean. The medicine we practice today, which is infinitely more sophisticated, is Rokitansky’s medicine. – Eric Kandel
I went to medical school after having decided to do so somewhere between my junior and senior year at Harvard – very late. I initially wanted to be an intellectual historian. – Eric Kandel
You learn emotional experiences as much as you learn cognitive experiences, except that they are more unconscious. Sometimes one represses the cognitive component of it, but it’s often more difficult to repress the emotional component. – Eric Kandel
I was interested in the nature of human mental processes, which is what got me interested in psychoanalysis. And it became clear to me after a while that mental processes come from the brain, and in order to understand them, you need to be a biologist of the brain. – Eric Kandel
I was born in Vienna on November 7, 1929, eleven years after the multiethnic Austro-Hungarian Empire fell apart following its defeat in World War I. – Eric Kandel
One of the ultimate challenges for biology is to understand the brain’s processing of unconscious and conscious perception, emotion, and empathy. – Eric Kandel
Since Socrates and Plato first speculated on the nature of the human mind, serious thinkers through the ages – from Aristotle to Descartes, from Aeschylus to Strindberg and Ingmar Bergman – have thought it wise to understand oneself and one’s behavior. – Eric Kandel
The brain is a complex biological organ possessing immense computational capability: it constructs our sensory experience, regulates our thoughts and emotions, and controls our actions. – Eric Kandel
I like problems at the borders of disciplines. One of the reasons that neurobiology of learning and memory appeal to me so much was that I liked the idea of bringing biology and psychology together. – Eric Kandel
In order to produce learned fear, you take a neutral stimulus like a tone, and you pair it with an electrical shock. Tone, shock. Tone, shock. So the animal learns that the tone is bad news. But you can also do the opposite – shock it at other times, but never when the tone comes on. – Eric Kandel
Ever since the Enlightenment, people thought that we were living in a rational universe. They thought that God was a mathematician and that the function of the scientist was to figure out the mathematical rules whereby the universe was created. – Eric Kandel
The problem of psychoanalysis is not the body of theory that Freud left behind, but the fact that it never became a medical science. It never tried to test its ideas. – Eric Kandel
What the Ellison Foundation and I are hoping to encourage is a more holistic approach to psychiatry, in which psychotherapy is put on as rigorous a level as psychopharmacology. – Eric Kandel
Modernism in Vienna brought together science and culture in a new way to create an Age of Insight that emphasized a more complex view of the human mind than had ever existed before. – Eric Kandel
My parents were not born in Vienna, but they had spent much of their lives there, having each come to the city at the beginning of World War I when they were still very young. – Eric Kandel
A brain scan may reveal the neural signs of anxiety, but a Kokoschka painting, or a Schiele self-portrait, reveals what an anxiety state really feels like. Both perspectives are necessary if we are to fully grasp the nature of the mind, yet they are rarely brought together. – Eric Kandel
Memory has always fascinated me. Think of it. You can recall at will your first day in high school, your first date, your first love. – Eric Kandel
In the 1950s and early 1960s, psychoanalysis swept through the intellectual community, and it was the dominant mode of thinking about the mind. People felt that this was a completely new set of insights into human motivation, and that its therapeutic potential was significant. – Eric Kandel
