Eric R. Kandel > Quotes

“It is this potential for plasticity of the relatively stereotyped units of the nervous system that endows each of us with our individuality.”
― Eric R. Kandel, Principles of Neural Science

“Science seeks to understand complex processes by reducing them to their essential actions and studying the interplay of those actions--and this reductionist approach extends to art as well. Indeed, my focus on one school of art, consisting of only three major representatives, is an example of this. Some people are concerned that a reductionist analysis will diminish our fascination with art, that it will trivialize art and deprive it of its special force, thereby reducing the beholder's share to an ordinary brain function. I argue to the contrary, that be encouraging a focus on one mental process at a time, reductionism can expand our vision and give us new insights into the nature and creation of art. These new insights will enable us to perceive unexpected aspects of art that derive from the relationships between the biological and psychological phenomena.”
― Eric Kandel

“Indeed, the underlying precept of the new science of mind is that all mental processes are biological—they all depend on organic molecules and cellular processes that occur literally “in our heads.” Therefore, any disorder or alteration of those processes must also have a biological basis.”
― Eric Kandel, In Search of Memory: The Emergence of a New Science of Mind

“philosophical inquiries (the reflections of specially trained observers on the nature of their own patterns of thought) or the insights of great novelists, such as Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and Leo Tolstoy. Those are the readings that inspired my first years at Harvard. But, as I learned from Ernst Kris, neither trained introspection nor creative insights would lead to the systematic accretion of knowledge needed for the foundation of a science of mind. That sort of foundation requires more than insight, it requires experimentation. Thus, it was the remarkable successes of experimental science in astronomy, physics, and chemistry that spurred students of mind to devise experimental”
― Eric R. Kandel, In Search of Memory: The Emergence of a New Science of Mind

“This reductionist vision is reflected in the evolution of his work. Perhaps Mondrian also implicitly realized that by excluding certain angles and focusing only on others he might pique the beholder’s curiosity and imagination about the omissions.”
― Eric R Kandel, Reductionism in Art and Brain Science: Bridging the Two Cultures

“Art is an institution to which we turn when we want to feel a shock of surprise. We feel this want because we sense that it is good for us once in a while to receive a healthy jolt. Otherwise we would so easily get stuck in a rut and could no longer adapt to the new demands that life is apt to make on us. The biological function of art, in other words, is that of a rehearsal, a training in mental gymnastics which increases our tolerance of the unexpected.”
― Eric R. Kandel, The Age of Insight: The Quest to Understand the Unconscious in Art, Mind, and Brain, from Vienna 1900 to the Present

“My central premise is that although the reductionist approaches of scientists and artists are not identical in their aims—scientists use reductionism to solve a complex problem and artists use it to elicit a new perceptual and emotional response in the beholder—they are analogous. For example,”
― Eric R Kandel, Reductionism in Art and Brain Science: Bridging the Two Cultures

“Emotions—sexuality, aggression, pleasure, fear, and pain—are instinctive processes. They color our lives and help us confront the fundamental challenges of avoiding pain and seeking pleasure. We”
― Eric R Kandel, Reductionism in Art and Brain Science: Bridging the Two Cultures

“In the process, he came to understand a crucial principle of brain function: our brain takes the incomplete information about the outside world that it receives from our eyes and makes it complete.”
― Eric R Kandel, Reductionism in Art and Brain Science: Bridging the Two Cultures

“Psychiatric illnesses were classified into two major groups—organic illnesses and functional illnesses—based on presumed differences in their origin. That classification, which dated to the nineteenth century, emerged from postmortem examinations of the brains of mental patients.”
― Eric Kandel, In Search of Memory: The Emergence of a New Science of Mind

“The discovery by Hubel and Wiesel of cells that respond to linear stimuli with specific axes of orientation may partly explain our response to Mondrian’s work, but it does not explain the artist’s focus on horizontal and vertical lines to the exclusion of oblique lines. Vertical”
― Eric R Kandel, Reductionism in Art and Brain Science: Bridging the Two Cultures

“Like Picasso and Braque, Mondrian explored the influential ideas of Paul Cézanne, who greatly influenced the analytic Cubists with his idea that all natural forms can be reduced to three figural primitives: the cube, the cone, and the sphere (Loran 2006; Kandel 2014). Mondrian recognized the plastic elements in analytic Cubism, and he began to echo the Cubists’ use of geometric shapes and interlocking planes. He reduced a specific object, such as a tree, to a few lines and then connected those lines to the surrounding space (fig. 6.4), thus entangling the branches of the tree with its surroundings. Yet whereas Cubist works played with simple shapes in a complex arena of shattered space, Mondrian’s art became more reductionist. He distilled figures to their most elemental forms, eliminating altogether the sense of perspective.”
― Eric R Kandel, Reductionism in Art and Brain Science: Bridging the Two Cultures

“The results of that work had shown that different patterns of stimulation alter the strength of synaptic connections in different ways. But Tauc and I had not examined how an actual behavior is changed and therefore had no evidence that learning really relies on changes in synaptic strength.”
― Eric R. Kandel, In Search of Memory: The Emergence of a New Science of Mind

“How are psychiatric and neurological disorders different? At the moment, the most obvious difference is the symptoms that patients experience. Neurological disorders tend to produce unusual behavior, or fragmentation of behavior into component parts, such as unusual movements of a person’s head or arms, or loss of motor control. By contrast, the major psychiatric disorders are often characterized by exaggerations of everyday behavior. We all feel despondent occasionally, but this feeling is dramatically amplified in depression. We all experience euphoria when things go well, but that feeling goes into overdrive in the manic phase of bipolar disorder. Normal fear and pleasure seeking can spiral into severe anxiety states and addiction. Even certain hallucinations and delusions from schizophrenia bear some resemblance to events that occur in our dreams.”
― Eric R. Kandel, The Disordered Mind: What Unusual Brains Tell Us About Ourselves

“Hermann von Helmholtz was the first to appreciate that the basilar membrane’s operation is essentially the inverse of a piano’s. The piano synthesizes a complex sound by combining the pure tones produced by numerous vibrating strings; the cochlea deconstructs a complex sound by isolating each component tone at a discrete segment of the basilar membrane.”
― Eric R. Kandel, Principles of Neural Science

“Specifically, damage to the left hemisphere can free up the creative capabilities of the right hemisphere. More generally, when one neural circuit in the brain is turned off, another circuit, which was inhibited by the inactivated circuit, may turn on. Scientists have also uncovered some surprising links between disorders that appear to be unrelated because they are characterized by dramatically different kinds of behavior. Several disorders of movement and of memory, such as Parkinson’s disease and Alzheimer’s disease, result from misfolded proteins. The symptoms of these disorders vary widely because the particular proteins affected and the functions for which they are responsible differ. Similarly, both autism and schizophrenia involve synaptic pruning, the removal of excess dendrites on neurons. In autism, not enough dendrites are pruned, whereas in schizophrenia too many are.”
― Eric R. Kandel, The Disordered Mind: What Unusual Brains Tell Us About Ourselves

“Vertical and horizontal lines represented for Mondrian the two opposing life forces: the positive and the negative, the dynamic and the static, the masculine and the feminine. This”
― Eric R Kandel, Reductionism in Art and Brain Science: Bridging the Two Cultures

“One of the great artists of this period, Barnett Newman, wrote about his response and that of his fellow artists: “We are freeing ourselves of the impediments of memory, association, nostalgia, legend, myth, or what have you, that have been devices of Western European painting.” In their attempt to”
― Eric R Kandel, Reductionism in Art and Brain Science: Bridging the Two Cultures

“Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan (2004), biographers of de Kooning, say that he was caught up in the excitement of the American century and felt he needed to seize the day. They write: Excavation was first and foremost an excavation of desire. The body was always turning up in the paint, evocatively, but could never be held for long in the eye: the flesh could never be entirely possessed. Any more settled description of the body would have diminished the sensation of physical movement, such as the caress of the hand or a leap of the heart, that was also a vital part of desire.”
― Eric R. Kandel, Reductionism in Art and Brain Science: Bridging the Two Cultures

“When repeated shocks and repeated release of serotonin are paired with the firing of the sensory neuron in associative learning, a signal is sent to the nucleus of the sensory neuron. This signal activates a gene, CREB-1, which leads to the growth of new connections between the sensory and motor neuron (fig. 4.5, right) (Bailey and Chen 1983; Kandel 2001). These connections are what enable a memory to persist. So if you remember anything of what you have read here, it will be because your brain is slightly different than it was before you started to read.”
― Eric R Kandel, Reductionism in Art and Brain Science: Bridging the Two Cultures

“We have seen that the region of our brain known as the amygdala orchestrates emotion and that it communicates with the hypothalamus, the region that houses the nerve cells that control instinctive behavior such as parenting, feeding, mating, fear, and fighting (chapter 3, fig. 3.5). Anderson found a nucleus, or cluster of neurons, within the hypothalamus that contains two distinct populations of neurons: one that regulates aggression and one that regulates mating (fig. 7.8). About 20 percent of the neurons located on the border between the two populations can be active during either mating or aggression. This suggests that the brain circuits regulating these two behaviors are intimately linked.”
― Eric R. Kandel, Reductionism in Art and Brain Science: Bridging the Two Cultures

“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

“Consciousness has three remarkable features. The first is qualitative feeling: listening to music is different from smelling a lemon. The second is subjectivity: awareness is going on in me. I am pretty sure that something similar is going on in you, but my relation to my own consciousness is not like my relation to anybody else’s. I know you are feeling pain when you burn your hand, but that’s because I am observing your behavior, not because I am experiencing—actually feeling—your pain. Only when I burn myself do I feel pain. The third feature is unity of experience: I experience the feeling of my shirt against my neck and the sound of my voice and the sight of all the other people sitting around the table as part of a single, unified consciousness—my experience—not a jumble of discrete sensory stimuli.”
― Eric R. Kandel, The Disordered Mind: What Unusual Brains Tell Us About Ourselves

“When memory is disrupted, these essential mental faculties suffer. Thus, memory is the glue that holds our mental life together. Without its unifying force, our consciousness would be broken into as many fragments as there are seconds in the day.”
― Eric R. Kandel, The Disordered Mind: What Unusual Brains Tell Us About Ourselves

“Woman I is considered to this day to be one of the most anxiety-producing and disturbing images of a woman in the history of art. In this painting de Kooning, who was reared by an abusive mother, creates an image that captures the divergent dimensions of the eternal woman: fertility, motherhood, aggressive sexual power, and savagery. She is at once a primitive earth mother and a femme fatale. With this image, marked by fanglike teeth and huge eyes that echo the shape of her enormous breasts, de Kooning gave birth to a new synthesis of the female. 7.6 The first known female sculpture, the Venus of Hohle Fels, circa 35,000 B.C.”
― Eric R. Kandel, Reductionism in Art and Brain Science: Bridging the Two Cultures

“Different mechanisms underlie short- and long-term memory storage. A single sensory neuron from the siphon skin connects to a motor neuron that innervates the gill. Short-term memory is produced by a single shock to the tail. This activates modulatory neurons (in blue) that cause a functional strengthening of the connections between the sensory and motor neurons. Long-term memory is produced by five repeated shocks to the tail. This activates the modulatory neurons more strongly and leads to the activation of CREB-1 genes and the growth of new synapses.”
― Eric R Kandel, Reductionism in Art and Brain Science: Bridging the Two Cultures

“How can two mutually exclusive behaviors—mating and fighting—be mediated by the same population of neurons? Anderson found that the difference hinges on the intensity of the stimulus applied. Weak sensory stimulation, such as foreplay, activates mating, whereas stronger stimulation, such as danger, activates aggression. In 1952 Meyer Schapiro paid”
― Eric R. Kandel, Reductionism in Art and Brain Science: Bridging the Two Cultures

“Gall 3rst had this idea as a young boy when he
noticed that those of his classmates who excelled at
memorizing school assignments had prominent eyes.”
― KANDEL

“In Vienna, Modernism had three main characteristics. The first was the new view of the human mind as being largely irrational by nature. In a radical break with the past, the Viennese modernists challenged the idea that society is based on the rational actions of rational human beings. Rather, they contended, unconscious conflicts are present in everyone in their everyday actions. By bringing these conflicts to the surface, the modernists confronted conventional attitudes and values with new ways of thought and feeling, and they questioned what constitutes reality, what lies below the surface appearances of people, objects, and events. Consequently, at a time when people elsewhere wanted to obtain greater mastery of the external world, of the means of production and the dissemination of knowledge, modernists in Vienna focused inward and tried to understand the irrationality of human nature and how irrational behavior is reflected in the relationship of one person to another. They discovered that beneath their elegant, civilized veneer, people harbor not only unconscious erotic feelings, but also unconscious aggressive impulses that are directed against themselves as well as others. Freud later called these dark impulses the death instinct. The”
― Eric R. Kandel, The Age of Insight: The Quest to Understand the Unconscious in Art, Mind, and Brain, from Vienna 1900 to the Present

“[Kandel is quoting John Eccles] I learned from [Karl] Popper what for me is the essence of scientific investigation - how to be speculative and imaginative in the creation of hypotheses, and then to challenge them with the utmost rigor, both by utilizing all existing knowledge and by mounting the most searching experimental attacks. In fact I learned from him even to rejoice in the refutation of a cherished hypothesis, because that too is a scientific achievement and because much has been learned by the refutation.

Through my association with Popper I experienced a great liberation in escaping from the rigid conventions that are generally held with respect to scientific research. . . . When one is liberated from these restrictive dogmas, scientific investigation becomes an exciting adventure opening up new visions; and this attitude has, I think, been reflected in my own scientific life since that time.”
― Eric R. Kandel, In Search of Memory: The Emergence of a New Science of Mind