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
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.
Interpretation
What this quote means
This quote emphasizes the importance of understanding human mental processes through the lens of biology, particularly neurobiology.
Eric Kandel highlights that our thoughts and mental processes are rooted in the biological functions of the brain. He suggests that to truly understand these processes, one must study the brain's biology, implying that psychological and biological fields are closely interconnected in exploring human nature.
Themes
BrainMental ProcessesPsychoanalysisBiologistUnderstanding
In practice
Example use cases
In a psychology lecture to illustrate the importance of biological studies in understanding mental health.
More from Eric Kandel
All quotes →Psychoanalysis has a degree of unreliability about it. You will never know whether you've found the truth. You may find a subjective truth, but you don't know.
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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.
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Ever since the Enlightenment, people thought that we were living in a rational universe. They thought that God was a mathematician and that the function of the scientist was to figure out the mathematical rules whereby the universe was created.
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A brain scan may reveal the neural signs of anxiety, but a Kokoschka painting, or a Schiele self-portrait, reveals what an anxiety state really feels like. Both perspectives are necessary if we are to fully grasp the nature of the mind, yet they are rarely brought together.
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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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