7 Quotes & Sayings By Eric Kandel

Eric Kandel is one of the world's most distinguished neuroscientists, and he has dedicated his life to understanding how the nervous system works. He is a Professor of Psychiatry at Columbia University, where he has directed the Kavli Institute for Brain Science since 1994. A Fellow of Rockefeller University (1968-1972), he served as the Chair of the Department of Physiology at Rockefeller (1972–1978) before moving to Columbia University. He also held visiting appointments at the Universities of California, Harvard, and Rutgers Read more

At Columbia, Dr. Kandel established the Laboratory of Molecular Neurophysiology to explore how individual nerve cells communicate with each other, which was followed by the establishment of the Center for Neural Science in 1990. At Columbia, he also directed the development of the first course in Neuroscience offered by an American university.

1
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. Eric Kandel
2
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
3
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
4
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
5
I went to medical school after having decided to do so somewhere between my junior and senior year at Harvard - very late. I initially wanted to be an intellectual historian. Eric Kandel
6
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