Eric Kandel Quotes

Everybody agrees that the brain is a remarkable machine. It's capable of generating an enormous number of phenomena, some of them very obvious and some of them less obvious. But I think that in the end there are going to be some very basic explanations for many things: emotions, awareness, consciousness, attention, perception, recognition.

When I look at the human brain I'm still in awe of it.

The brain is the most complicated organ in the universe. We have learned a lot about other human organs. We know how the heart pumps and how the kidney does what it does. To a certain degree, we have read the letters of the human genome. But the brain has 100 billion neurons. Each one of those has about 10,000 connections.

The human brain works in, so far, mysterious and wondrous ways that are completely different than the ways that computers calculate. Things like appetite or emotion, how do those function in the brain?

The thing you realize when you get into studying neuroscience, even a little bit, is that everything is connected to everything else. So it's as if the brain is trying to use everything at its disposal - what it is seeing, what it is hearing, what is the temperature, past experience.

The brain is such an incredible computer.

The brain is so intricate. It can do so many things, and people sleep on it. It's not just a piece of meat in there - it can do so much.

Brain: an apparatus with which we think we think.

All our behaviours are a result of neurophysiological activity in the brain.

The human brain is probably one of the most complex single objects on the face of the earth; I think it is, quite honestly.

The human brain is an incredible pattern-matching machine.

In our skulls, we carry around 3 pounds of slimy, wet, greyish tissue, corrugated like crumpled toilet paper. You wouldn't think, to look at the unappetizing lump, that it was some of the most powerful stuff in the known universe.

One of the ultimate challenges for biology is to understand the brain's processing of unconscious and conscious perception, emotion, and empathy.

The human brain has 100 billion neurons, each neuron connected to 10 thousand other neurons. Sitting on your shoulders is the most complicated object in the known universe.

Independent of what is happening around you in the outside world, humans constantly have internal activity in the brain.

Space and time, not proteins and neurons, hold the answer to the problem of consciousness. When we consider the nerve impulses entering the brain, we realize that they are not woven together automatically, any more than the information is inside a computer.

Experiences shape the brain, but the brain shapes the way we view experiences, too.

We pretend that the brain is binary, like a computer. But it's not. It's completely holographic.

We know a certain amount about neurons. You can do fMRI and watch parts of the brain light up. But what happens in the middle is poorly understood.

In the brain, you have connections between the neurons called synapses, and they can change. All your knowledge is stored in those synapses.

In terms of the brain, you can in a crude way think of the human brain as a computer.

The mind controls everything; it really does.

The human brain is a wonderful organ. It starts to work as soon as you are born and doesn't stop until you get up to deliver a speech.

The three-pound organ in your skull - with its pink consistency of Jell-o - is an alien kind of computational material. It is composed of miniaturized, self-configuring parts, and it vastly outstrips anything we've dreamt of building.

Our bodies are hanging along for the ride, but my brain is talking to your brain. And if we want to understand who we are and how we feel and perceive, we really understand what brains are.