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
What this quote means
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.
Themes
PlasticityIndividualityNervous SystemNeuroscienceUniqueness
In practice
Example use cases
In a neuroscience seminar discussing the importance of brain plasticity.
More from Eric Kandel
All quotes βPsychoanalysis 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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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.
Eric KandelRead
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