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.
Truth has many dimensions and the way you arrive at truth in complex situations is through many perspectives.
As you know in most areas of science there are long periods of beginning before we really make progress.
In art as in science reductionism does not trivialize our perception - of color light and perspective - but allows us to see each of these components in a new way.
I was born in Vienna on November 7 1929 eleven years after the multiethnic Austro-Hungarian Empire fell apart following its defeat in World War I.
I don't think biology is replacing the feeling experienced through art. Biology is capable of giving additional insights. It's a parallel not a substitutive process.
When I was a medical student in the 1950s we practically never spoke about Alzheimer's disease. And why is that so? And that is because people didn't live long enough to have Alzheimer's disease.
Memory has always fascinated me. Think of it. You can recall at will your first day in high school your first date your first love.
I see psychoanalysis art and biology ultimately coming together just like cognitive psychology and neuroscience have merged.
One of the ultimate challenges for biology is to understand the brain's processing of unconscious and conscious perception emotion and empathy.
The biology of mind bridges the sciences - concerned with the natural world - and the humanities - concerned with the meaning of human experience.
I like problems at the borders of disciplines. One of the reasons that neurobiology of learning and memory appeal to me so much was that I liked the idea of bringing biology and psychology together.
The brain is a complex biological organ of great computational capability that constructs our sensory experiences regulates our thoughts and emotions and control our actions.
The brain is a complex biological organ possessing immense computational capability: it constructs our sensory experience regulates our thoughts and emotions and controls our actions.
If you have a lesion in the hippocampus in both sides you have short term memory but you can convert that short term memory into long term memory.
My parents were not born in Vienna but they had spent much of their lives there having each come to the city at the beginning of World War I when they were still very young.
Nerve cells communicate with one another at specialized points called synapses. And these synapses are plastic - they can be modified by learning.
Long-term memory involves enduring changes that result from the growth of new synaptic connections.
Life is sort of a circle. You come back to a lot of the interests that you had early in life.
I was reluctant to be critical of the United States because I thought the United States could do no wrong; that the government could not lie to its people.
One of the wonderful things about Internet is it's like a salon. It brings people together from different intellectual walks of life.
One of the wonderful things about Internet is its like a salon. It brings people together from different intellectual walks of life.
Modernism in Vienna brought together science and culture in a new way to create an Age of Insight that emphasized a more complex view of the human mind than had ever existed before.
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.
Not only Freud but artists and writers were also interested in the unconscious. It was medicine that made the first steps toward modernity.
What the Ellison Foundation and I are hoping to encourage is a more holistic approach to psychiatry in which psychotherapy is put on as rigorous a level as psychopharmacology.
If you read any of my books they tend to have a strong historical perspective.
I went to medical school after having decided to do so somewhere between my junior and senior year at Harvard - very late. I initially wanted to be an intellectual historian.
It is this potential for plasticity of the relatively stereotyped units of the nervous system that endows each of us with our individuality.
Memory is everything. Without it we are nothing
Self-portraits are a way of revealing something about oneself.