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
It is this potential for plasticity of the relatively stereotyped units of the nervous system that endows each of us with our individuality.
Interpretation
The flexibility of our nervous system allows for individual differences among people.
This quote by Eric Kandel highlights how the nervous system's ability to adapt and change contributes to the uniqueness of each person. It emphasizes the importance of neural plasticity in shaping individual identities and experiences.
In practice
In a neuroscience seminar discussing the importance of brain plasticity.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history.
It was the late Dr. Mahendra Lal Sircar who, by founding the Indian Association for the Cultivation of Science, made it possible for the scientific aspirations of my early years to continue burning brightly.
The bedrock nature of space and time and the unification of cosmos and quantum are surely among science's great 'open frontiers.' These are parts of the intellectual map where we're still groping for the truth - where, in the fashion of ancient cartographers, we must still inscribe 'here be dragons.'
Thanks to farm subsidies, the fine collaboration between agribusiness and Congress, soy, corn and cattle became king. And chicken soon joined them on the throne. It was during this period that the cycle of dietary and planetary destruction began, the thing we're only realizing just now.
I sometimes try to imagine what would have happened if weβd known the bonobo first and the chimpanzee only laterβor not at all. The discussion about human evolution might not revolve as much around violence, warfare and male dominance, but rather around sexuality, empathy, caring and cooperation. What a different intellectual landscape we would occupy!
When we seed millions of acres of land with these plants, what happens to foraging birds, to insects, to microbes, to the other animals, when they come in contact and digest plants that are producing materials ranging from plastics to vaccines to pharmaceutical products?
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.