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It is this potential for plasticity of the relatively stereotyped units of the nervous system that endows each of us with our individuality.
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Eric R. Kandel |
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This reductionist vision is reflected in the evolution of his work. Perhaps Mondrian also implicitly realized that by excluding certain angles and focusing only on others he might pique the beholder's curiosity and imagination about the omissions.
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Eric R Kandel |
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philosophical inquiries (the reflections of specially trained observers on the nature of their own patterns of thought) or the insights of great novelists, such as Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and Leo Tolstoy. Those are the readings that inspired my first years at Harvard. But, as I learned from Ernst Kris, neither trained introspection nor creative insights would lead to the systematic accretion of knowledge needed for ..
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Eric R. Kandel |
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Vertical and horizontal lines represented for Mondrian the two opposing life forces: the positive and the negative, the dynamic and the static, the masculine and the feminine. This
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Eric R Kandel |
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My central premise is that although the reductionist approaches of scientists and artists are not identical in their aims--scientists use reductionism to solve a complex problem and artists use it to elicit a new perceptual and emotional response in the beholder--they are analogous. For example,
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Eric R Kandel |
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In the process, he came to understand a crucial principle of brain function: our brain takes the incomplete information about the outside world that it receives from our eyes and makes it complete.
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Eric R Kandel |
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When repeated shocks and repeated release of serotonin are paired with the firing of the sensory neuron in associative learning, a signal is sent to the nucleus of the sensory neuron. This signal activates a gene, CREB-1, which leads to the growth of new connections between the sensory and motor neuron (fig. 4.5, right) (Bailey and Chen 1983; Kandel 2001). These connections are what enable a memory to persist. So if you remember anything of..
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Eric R Kandel |
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One of the great artists of this period, Barnett Newman, wrote about his response and that of his fellow artists: "We are freeing ourselves of the impediments of memory, association, nostalgia, legend, myth, or what have you, that have been devices of Western European painting." In their attempt to"
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Eric R Kandel |
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Like Picasso and Braque, Mondrian explored the influential ideas of Paul Cezanne, who greatly influenced the analytic Cubists with his idea that all natural forms can be reduced to three figural primitives: the cube, the cone, and the sphere (Loran 2006; Kandel 2014). Mondrian recognized the plastic elements in analytic Cubism, and he began to echo the Cubists' use of geometric shapes and interlocking planes. He reduced a specific object, s..
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Eric R Kandel |
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Woman I is considered to this day to be one of the most anxiety-producing and disturbing images of a woman in the history of art. In this painting de Kooning, who was reared by an abusive mother, creates an image that captures the divergent dimensions of the eternal woman: fertility, motherhood, aggressive sexual power, and savagery. She is at once a primitive earth mother and a femme fatale. With this image, marked by fanglike teeth and hu..
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Eric R. Kandel |
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We have seen that the region of our brain known as the amygdala orchestrates emotion and that it communicates with the hypothalamus, the region that houses the nerve cells that control instinctive behavior such as parenting, feeding, mating, fear, and fighting (chapter 3, fig. 3.5). Anderson found a nucleus, or cluster of neurons, within the hypothalamus that contains two distinct populations of neurons: one that regulates aggression and on..
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Eric R. Kandel |
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How can two mutually exclusive behaviors--mating and fighting--be mediated by the same population of neurons? Anderson found that the difference hinges on the intensity of the stimulus applied. Weak sensory stimulation, such as foreplay, activates mating, whereas stronger stimulation, such as danger, activates aggression. In 1952 Meyer Schapiro paid
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Eric R. Kandel |
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Emotions--sexuality, aggression, pleasure, fear, and pain--are instinctive processes. They color our lives and help us confront the fundamental challenges of avoiding pain and seeking pleasure. We
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Eric R Kandel |
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The results of that work had shown that different patterns of stimulation alter the strength of synaptic connections in different ways. But Tauc and I had not examined how an actual behavior is changed and therefore had no evidence that learning really relies on changes in synaptic strength.
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Eric R. Kandel |
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Different mechanisms underlie short- and long-term memory storage. A single sensory neuron from the siphon skin connects to a motor neuron that innervates the gill. Short-term memory is produced by a single shock to the tail. This activates modulatory neurons (in blue) that cause a functional strengthening of the connections between the sensory and motor neurons. Long-term memory is produced by five repeated shocks to the tail. This activat..
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Eric R Kandel |
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The discovery by Hubel and Wiesel of cells that respond to linear stimuli with specific axes of orientation may partly explain our response to Mondrian's work, but it does not explain the artist's focus on horizontal and vertical lines to the exclusion of oblique lines. Vertical
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Eric R Kandel |
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Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan (2004), biographers of de Kooning, say that he was caught up in the excitement of the American century and felt he needed to seize the day. They write: Excavation was first and foremost an excavation of desire. The body was always turning up in the paint, evocatively, but could never be held for long in the eye: the flesh could never be entirely possessed. Any more settled description of the body would have dim..
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Eric R. Kandel |
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Kandinsky argued that, like music, art need not represent objects: the sublime aspects of the human spirit and soul can only be expressed through abstraction. Just as music moves the heart of the listener, so form and color in painting should move the heart of the beholder.
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Eric R Kandel |