QuoteProject
It is this potential for plasticity of the relatively stereotyped units of the nervous system that endows each of us with our individuality.
Eric Kandel
ShareWTF𝕏

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

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
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.
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.
Eric KandelRead
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.
Eric KandelRead
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.
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.
Eric KandelRead

Similar quotes

A lot of scientists hate writing. Most scientists love being in the lab and doing the work and when the work is done, they are finished.
Stephen Jay GouldRead
An experiment is a question which science poses to Nature and a measurement is the recording of Nature's answer.
Max PlanckRead
As scientists, we step on the shoulders of science, building on the work that has come before us - aiming to inspire a new generation of young scientists to continue once we are gone.
Stephen HawkingRead
It is not so much that I have confidence in scientists being right, but that I have so much in nonscientists being wrong.
Isaac AsimovRead
Notwithstanding all that has been discovered since Newton's time, his saying that we are little children picking up pretty pebbles on the beach while the whole ocean lies before us unexplored remains substantially as true as ever, and will do so though we shovel up the pebbles by steam shovels and carry them off in carloads.
Charles Sanders PeirceRead
Science is essentially an anarchic enterprise: theoretical anarchism is more humanitarian and more likely to encourage progress than its law-and-order alternatives.
Paul FeyerabendRead

A little wisdom, now and then

Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.