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.
Eric KandelRead
You learn emotional experiences as much as you learn cognitive experiences, except that they are more unconscious. Sometimes one represses the cognitive component of it, but it's often more difficult to repress the emotional component.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Emotional experiences are deeply ingrained and often harder to suppress than cognitive ones.
In this quote, Eric Kandel reflects on the nature of learning and memory, highlighting the distinction between cognitive and emotional experiences. While we may consciously engage in cognitive learning, emotional experiences often operate at a subconscious level, making them more challenging to repress or forget. This suggests that our emotions play a critical role in shaping our understanding and experiences of the world, influencing our reactions and memories more profoundly than mere cognitive learning alone.
Themes
EmotionsLearningExperienceMemoryCognition
In practice
Example use cases
This quote can be shared in a psychology class to highlight the impact of emotions on learning.
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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.
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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.
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