Eric Kandel Quotes

For memory, we use our imagination. We take a few strands of real time and carry them with us, then like an oyster we create a pearl around them.

While the hippocampus itself doesn't store memories, it serves to triage our experiences based upon their survival significance.

The hippocampus helps record both types of memories initially, and it helps retain them for the medium term. The hippocampus also helps us access old personal memories in long-term storage in other parts of the brain.

Why do we remember stuff from when we were 5 years old but not important facts that are more recent?

Memory is a big one: our ability to use the memory and move things in and out efficiently - that affected what we were able to do more than anything.

Memory, in my opinion, is a complete noodle. It hangs on the silliest things but forgets the stuff that really matters.

Memory is the basis of every journey.

Memory is like a spiderweb that catches new information. The more it catches, the bigger it grows. And the bigger it grows, the more it catches.

People's memories are maybe the fuel they burn to stay alive.

Series of syllables which have been learned by heart, forgotten, and learned anew must be similar as to their inner conditions at the times when they can be recited.

We do not know where to look, or what to look for, when something is memorized. We do not know what it means, or what change there is in the nervous system, when a fact is learned. This is a very important problem which has not been solved at all.

I met with amnesiacs and savants, educators and scientists, to try to understand what memory is, why it works, why it sometimes doesn't, and what its potential might be.

If it's hard to remember, it'll be difficult to forget.

I don't think forgetting is an important feature of human memory. I think it's important to be able to remember things accurately.

As bad as we are at remembering names and phone numbers and word-for-word instructions from our colleagues, we have really exceptional visual and spatial memories.

The two offices of memory are collection and distribution.

I have a great memory.

The function of memory is not only to preserve, but also to throw away. If you remembered everything from your entire life, you would be sick.

How is it that we remember the least triviality that happens to us, and yet not remember how often we have recounted it to the same person?

Some people say they use images to help them remember intricacies. Others say they just remember. If they are able to form an image of the face, it is because they remember how it was: it is not that an image guides memory, but that memory produces an image, or the sense of imaging. We have no agreed way to talk clearly about such things.

My dad thinks I have a photographic memory.

Deep non-REM sleep almost hits the save button on those recently acquired informational pieces so that when you wake up the next morning, you have remembering rather than forgetting.

I've always been fascinated by memory and I remember Jonah, when we first started dating, was working on something involving memory. It was early on in our relationship and I was like, damn it, I wanted to do a movie on memory. That was 'Memento.'

Why is it that I can remember so easily the lyrics to the opening theme song of 'Gilligan's Island?' Why do I remember these trivial things, and I can't remember the names of important collaborators?

On the stem of memory imaginations blossom.