Eric Kandel Quotes

One can, in principle, outline sort of a set of neural circuits that are critically involved and even identify disorders that affect different components of that neural circuit and see what happens if you knock out, for example, inability to recognize faces, how it affects your response to portraiture.

Who sees the human face correctly: the photographer, the mirror, or the painter?

The eye is continually influenced by what it cannot detect; nay, it is not going too far, to say that it is most influenced by what it detects least. Let the painter define, if he can, the variations of lines on which depend the change of expression in the human countenance.

99 percent of what you see is not what comes in through the eyes. It is what you infer about that room.

Pictures and shapes are but secondary objects and please or displease only in the memory.

The faces people make when they are photographed and the face they have when you draw them are very different.

Replacing human vision is more than just a tool: we need to understand how that affects the brain.

I see things with my own eyes, just as if they were the first eyes that ever saw, and then I set about to tell, as best I can, just what I've seen.

It is not like adding wrinkles to look older; it is using the wrinkles I already have to say something else. What is disturbing is not seeing more lines on my face but seeing that the range of possibilities of what I can do is much more limited.

There is something about the way I photograph. People often say, 'Are you cross with me?' My eyes can look sort of... like a wall.

It's amazing what your brain can do when all your senses are heightened.

The way we have been thinking about brain science is that people show you pretty pictures, pretty images, and you think that that tells you something about how they behave. It doesn't.

In photographing dwarfs, you don't get majesty & beauty. You get dwarfs.

Faces are the most interesting things we see

Visual cortex is fundamentally a machine whose job is to generate a model of the world.

We see with the eyes, but we see with the brain as well. And seeing with the brain is often called imagination.

Art has something to do with the arrest of attention in the midst of distraction.

I discover vision, not as a 'thinking about seeing,' to use Descartes expression, but as a gaze at grips with a visible world, and that is why for me there can be another's gaze.

So how, children, does the brain, which lives without a spark of light, build for us a world full of light?

Shaped a little like a loaf of French country bread, our brain is a crowded chemistry lab, bustling with nonstop neural conversations.

What it sees there isn't so much a face as the expression of a predicament.

The task of neural science is to explain behaviour in terms of the activities of the brain. How does the brain marshall its millions of individual nerve cells to produce behaviour, and how are these cells influenced by the environment...? The last frontier of the biological sciences – their ultimate challenge – is to understand the biological basis of consciousness and the mental processes by which we perceive, act, learn, and remember.

The brain is really hard to see. The whole thing is very large - the human brain is several pounds in weight - but the connections between brain cells, known as synapses, are really tiny. They're nanoscale in dimension. So if you want to see how the cells of the brain are connected in networks, you have to see those connections, those synapses.

Art trains the mind through the eye, and the eye through the mind. As the sun colors flowers, so does art color life.

The eye always fills in the imperfections.