Eric Kandel
Eric Kandel
Eric Richard Kandelis an Austrian-American neuropsychiatrist. He was a recipient of the 2000 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his research on the physiological basis of memory storage in neurons. He shared the prize with Arvid Carlsson and Paul Greengard...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionScientist
Date of Birth7 November 1929
CountryUnited States of America
animal men views
There was an idea that God created man different from other animals, because man was rational and animals had drives and instincts. That idea of a rational man that was specially created went out the window when Darwin showed that we evolved from animal ancestors, that we have instincts, much as do animals, and that our instincts are very important. It was a much more sophisticated, nuanced, and rich view of the human mind.
opportunity artist people
Vienna is relatively small. And it had wonderful salons, opportunities for people to get together. There was a lot of interaction between scientists and non-scientists, between Jews and non-Jews, between artists, writers and scientists, including medical scientists.
country hands years
I have on the one hand a hatred and on the other a yearning for Vienna. I left when I was nine years old because I was Jewish. And even before 1938, the anti-Semitism in Austria was probably deeper than it was in Germany or in other European countries.
self revealing-something way
Self-portraits are a way of revealing something about oneself.
circles life-is interest
Life is sort of a circle. You come back to a lot of the interests that you had early in life.
people intellectual together
One of the wonderful things about Internet is its like a salon. It brings people together from different intellectual walks of life.
art psychology together
I see psychoanalysis, art and biology ultimately coming together, just like cognitive psychology and neuroscience have merged.
art color light
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.
artist medicine firsts
Not only Freud but artists and writers were also interested in the unconscious. It was medicine that made the first steps toward modernity.
long progress periods
As you know, in most areas of science, there are long periods of beginning before we really make progress.
running people mind
Biology is a way of approaching the truth about the mind. In biology most people don't tackle problems at the level of complexity that psychoanalysis does. But psychoanalysis has a degree of uncertainty about it. A psychoanalyst may have some deep insights, but cannot, at the moment, run experiments to establish whether it's really the truth.
cells expression perception
There are cells in the brain that respond to faces. This is one of the reasons that I deal with portraiture. We can learn a lot about our perception of facial expression from the behavior of these cells.
perspective way dimensions
Truth has many dimensions, and the way you arrive at truth in complex situations is through many perspectives.
cells challenges brain
The task of neural science is to explain behaviour in terms of the activities of the brain. How does the brain marshall its millions of individual nerve cells to produce behaviour, and how are these cells influenced by the environment...? The last frontier of the biological sciences – their ultimate challenge – is to understand the biological basis of consciousness and the mental processes by which we perceive, act, learn, and remember.