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.
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
Life ... is a relationship between molecules.
Linus PaulingRead
The fact that life evolved out of nearly nothing, some 10 billion years after the universe evolved out of literally nothing, is a fact so staggering that I would be mad to attempt words to do it justice.
Richard DawkinsRead
Whoever wishes to acquire a deep acquaintance with Nature must observe that there are analogies which connect whole branches of science in a parallel manner, and enable us to infer of one class of phenomena what we know of another. It has thus happened on several occasions that the discovery of an unsuspected analogy between two branches of knowledge has been the starting point for a rapid course of discovery.
William Stanley JevonsRead
In a spiral galaxy, the ratio of dark-to-light matter is about a factor of ten. That's probably a good number for the ratio of our ignorance-to-knowledge. We're out of kindergarten, but only in about third grade.
Vera RubinRead
In any field, find the strangest thing and then explore it.
John Archibald WheelerRead
But the beauty of Einstein's equations, for example, is just as real to anyone who's experienced it as the beauty of music. We've learned in the 20th century that the equations that work have inner harmony.
Edward WittenRead