70 Quotes by Eric Kandel

Nerve cells communicate with one another at specialized points called synapses. And these synapses are plastic - they can be modified by learning.

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.

One can, in principle, outline sort of a set of neural circuits that are critically involved and even identify disorders that affect different components of that neural circuit and see what happens if you knock out, for example, inability to recognize faces, how it affects your response to portraiture.

I was reluctant to be critical of the United States because I thought the United States could do no wrong; that the government could not lie to its people.

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.

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.

Long-term memory involves enduring changes that result from the growth of new synaptic connections.

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.

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.