Quotes from Eric R. Kandel

We do not have direct access to the physical world. It may feel as if we have direct access, but this is an illusion created by our brain" (Frith 2007).

Rothko's paintings consist of strong formal elements such as color, shape, balance, depth, composition, and scale.

As Rothko was to say about these later works, "A painting is not a picture of an experience. It is an experience.

Following the lead of Paul Cézanne and the Cubists, Greenberg saw that the distinctive feature of painting is its flatness; therefore, he thought that painting should purge itself of all illusions of depth and turn that concern over to sculpture.

Until the twentieth century, Western art had traditionally portrayed the world in a three-dimensional perspective, using recognizable images in a familiar way. Abstract art broke with that tradition to show us the world in a completely unfamiliar way, exploring the relationship of shapes, spaces, and colors to one another.

They explored the nature of visual representation by reducing images to their essential elements of form, line, color, or light.

Wilson argues that knowledge is gained and science progresses through a process of conflict and resolution.

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.

Consciousness is the state of awareness, or sentience. It begins in the morning when we wake up, and it continues all day until we go to sleep again at night, or otherwise become unconscious.

Perhaps the most surprising recent finding uncovered by the large collaborative effort on the genetics of schizophrenia is that some of the same genes that create a risk for schizophrenia also create a risk for bipolar disorder. What's more, a different group of genes that creates a risk for schizophrenia also creates a risk for autism spectrum disorders.

Our perception of the world is a fantasy that coincides with reality. (Frith 2007)

It is this potential for plasticity of the relatively stereotyped units of the nervous system that endows each of us with our individuality.

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.

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.

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.

The insula not only evaluates and integrates the emotional or motivational importance of these stimuli, it also coordinates external sensory information and our internal motivational states. This consciousness of bodily states is a measure of our emotional awareness of self, the feeling that "I am.

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.

Disordered thought detaches a person from reality, leading to altered perceptions and behavior, such as hallucinations and delusions. These psychotic symptoms can be terrifying, not just for people who experience them but also for people who witness them. They are also a major cause of the stigma attached to people with schizophrenia.