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" There was little in my early life to indicate that an interest in biology would become the passion of my academic career. In fact, there was little to suggest I would have an academic career. "
Eric Kandel
Life
Passion
Biology
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" Life is sort of a circle. You come back to a lot of the interests that you had early in life. "
Eric Kandel
Come
You
Life
" 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
People
God
Universe
" My heart beats in three-quarter time. "
Eric Kandel
Heart
Beats
Time
" I've been around a long time, and I've been interested in memory for a long time. And one of my earlier interests in molecular biology of memory led me to define the switch that converts short term to long term memory. "
Eric Kandel
Time
Long
Long Time
" Long-term memory involves enduring changes that result from the growth of new synaptic connections. "
Eric Kandel
Changes
Memory
Growth
" 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
Painting
Brain
Nature
" The problem for many people is that we cannot point to the underlying biological bases of most psychiatric disorders. In fact, we are nowhere near understanding them as well as we understand disorders of the liver or the heart. "
Eric Kandel
Problem
Understanding
People
" 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
Bad
News
You
" 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
Sometimes
More
Learn
" 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
Growth
Experience
Simple
" The biology of mind bridges the sciences - concerned with the natural world - and the humanities - concerned with the meaning of human experience. "
Eric Kandel
Human
Mind
World
" I would not necessarily say that scientists and artists need to collaborate with one another, but it would be helpful for them to talk to one another to, perhaps, give rise to specific ideas that may or may not be carried out together. "
Eric Kandel
Need
Say
Rise
" One of the ultimate challenges for biology is to understand the brain's processing of unconscious and conscious perception, emotion, and empathy. "
Eric Kandel
Empathy
Perception
Brain
" 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
Ideas
Science
Body
" It may act as an ancillary factor, but by itself, the mutation in tau doesn't give you Alzheimer's disease. This is not to say the tau is not very important. It may be important in propagating the disorder from one cell to another. But as a causal mechanism, the evidence is strongest for beta amyloid abnormalities. "
Eric Kandel
Evidence
You
Say
" Nerve cells communicate with one another at specialized points called synapses. And these synapses are plastic - they can be modified by learning. "
Eric Kandel
Plastic
Learning
Communicate
" 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
Reading
Disappointment
Looking
" 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
Mind
Culture
Age
" 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
Behavior
Thought
Wise
" Indeed, artists, particularly modern artists, have intentionally limited the scope and vocabulary of their expression to convey, as Mark Rothko and Ad Reinhardt do, the most essential, even spiritual, ideas of their art. "
Eric Kandel
Spiritual
Ideas
Expression
" As you know, in most areas of science, there are long periods of beginning before we really make progress. "
Eric Kandel
Long
Science
Progress
" 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
Encourage
Foundation
Put
" One of the ultimate challenges of biology is to understand how the brain becomes consciously aware of perception, experience and emotion. But it is equally conceivable that the exchange would be useful for the beholders of art, for people who enjoy art, for historians, and for the artists themselves. "
Eric Kandel
Challenges
People
Art
" 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
People
Together
Like
" Early in my career, I was disappointed that psychoanalysis was not becoming more empirical, was not becoming more scientific. It was primarily concerned with individual patients. It wasn't trying to collect data from large groups of people who have been analyzed. "
Eric Kandel
People
Early
Data
" When I was a medical student in the 1950s, we practically never spoke about Alzheimer's disease. And why is that so? And that is because people didn't live long enough to have Alzheimer's disease. "
Eric Kandel
Enough
Long
Live
" If you read any of my books, they tend to have a strong historical perspective. "
Eric Kandel
Strong
Perspective
Read
" I found working in the lab is so completely different than reading a textbook about it. You know, you're planning strategies; you're working with your own hands. There's essential satisfaction in running experiments. "
Eric Kandel
Reading
Know
Own
" I have a philosophy that has guided me throughout all of my scientific career, and that is, I think of myself as a fairly thoughtful person. I don't go into projects impetuously, and I try to select important problems. "
Eric Kandel
Me
Think
Myself
" 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
Look
Simple
Memory