Quotes from Eric Kandel

I've been collecting art for much of my adult life. I started around 1960. And my wife and I really enjoy art a great deal. We don't have a lot of money, so we have works on paper, but we enjoy them a great deal.

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.

Carl von Rokitansky is one of the founders of scientific medicine and systematized it, looking at what the clinical symptoms mean. The medicine we practice today, which is infinitely more sophisticated, is Rokitansky's medicine.

My heart beats in three-quarter time.

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.

If you read any of my books, they tend to have a strong historical perspective.

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.

As you know, in most areas of science, there are long periods of beginning before we really make progress.

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.

Life is sort of a circle. You come back to a lot of the interests that you had early in life.

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.

If you have a lesion in the hippocampus in both sides, you have short term memory, but you can convert that short term memory into long term memory.

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.

I was interested in the nature of human mental processes, which is what got me interested in psychoanalysis. And it became clear to me after a while that mental processes come from the brain, and in order to understand them, you need to be a biologist of the brain.

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.

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.

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.

In the 1950s and early 1960s, psychoanalysis swept through the intellectual community, and it was the dominant mode of thinking about the mind. People felt that this was a completely new set of insights into human motivation, and that its therapeutic potential was significant.

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.

Memory has always fascinated me. Think of it. You can recall at will your first day in high school, your first date, your first love.

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.

The biology of mind bridges the sciences - concerned with the natural world - and the humanities - concerned with the meaning of human experience.

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.

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.