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
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.
Interpretation
This quote emphasizes the importance of both scientific and artistic perspectives in understanding human anxiety.
Eric Kandel highlights the duality of understanding anxiety through both objective scientific methods, like brain scans, and subjective artistic expressions, such as paintings. He argues that while brain scans can identify physical indicators of anxiety, artworks embody the emotional and psychological experience of the condition, and together they provide a more comprehensive understanding of the mind's complexities.
In practice
This quote could be used in a discussion about the intersection of psychology and the arts during a mental health conference.
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.
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.
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.
If gratitude, when exerted towards another, naturally produces a very pleasing sensation in the mind of a grateful man, it exalts the soul into rapture when it is employed on this great object of gratitude to the beneficent Being who has given us everything we already possess, and from whom we expect everything we yet hope for.
What did I really think fifteen years ago? A nonbeliever, I felt guilty in the midst of all those believers. And since it seemed to me that they were in the right, I decided to believe, as you might decide to take an aspirin: It can't hurt and you might get better.
Most people have stereo vision, so why belittle that very, very important element of our existence?
The aim of torture is to destroy a person as a human being, to destroy their identity and soul. It is more evil than murder.
Emancipated' women found out that the honesty, generosity, and camaraderie of men was a lie.
Who knows the end? What has risen may sink, and what has sunk may rise. Loathsomeness waits and dreams in the deep, and decay spreads over the tottering cities of men.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.