Eric Kandel

“I would not necessarily say that scientists and artists need to collaborate with one another, but it would be helpful for them to talk to one another to, perhaps, give rise to specific ideas that may or may not be carried out together.”

“One of the wonderful things about Internet is it's like a salon. It brings people together from different intellectual walks of life.”

“Rather than studying the most complex form of memory in a very complicated animal, we had to take the most simple form - an implicit form of memory - in a very simple animal. So I began to look around for very simple animals. And I focused in on the marine snail Aplysia.”

“The problem of psychoanalysis is not the body of theory that Freud left behind, but the fact that it never became a medical science. It never tried to test its ideas.”

“In order to produce learned fear, you take a neutral stimulus like a tone, and you pair it with an electrical shock. Tone, shock. Tone, shock. So the animal learns that the tone is bad news. But you can also do the opposite - shock it at other times, but never when the tone comes on.”

“Indeed, artists, particularly modern artists, have intentionally limited the scope and vocabulary of their expression to convey, as Mark Rothko and Ad Reinhardt do, the most essential, even spiritual, ideas of their art.”

“There was little in my early life to indicate that an interest in biology would become the passion of my academic career. In fact, there was little to suggest I would have an academic career.”