physicians-from-austria

"We stand in the midst of a massive reorganization of our intellectual and spiritual life, which has seized all areas of this life—not least in medicine. The central idea of the new Reich—that the whole is more than its parts, and that the Volk is more important than the individual—had to bring about fundamental changes in our whole attitude, since this regards the nation’s most precious asset, its health."

"Doctrinaire formula-worship, that is our real enemy."

"As the art historian Emily Braun has documented, Klimt read Darwin and became fascinated with the structure of the cell... Thus, the small iconographic images on Adelle's dress are not simply decorative... they are symbols of male and female cells: rectangular sperm and ovoid eggs. ...designed to match the sitter's seductive face and her full-blown reproductive capacities."

"Science may explain aspects of art but it will not replace the inspiration that art evokes..."

"In Vienna, Modernism had three main characteristics. The first was the new view of the human mind as being largely irrational by nature. ...they questioned what constitutes reality, what lies below the surface appearances of people, objects, and events. ...They discovered that ...people harbor not only unconscious erotic feelings, but also unconscious aggressive impulses that are directed against themselves as well as against others. Freud later called these dark impulses the death instinct."

"The fundamental mechanisms that Eric Kandel has revealed [in Aplysia] are also applicable to humans... Even if the road towards an understanding of complex memory functions still is long, the results... have provided a fundamental building stone. It is now possible to continue and, for instance, study how complex memory images are stored in the nervous system, and how it is possible to recreate the memory of earlier events..."

"The portraits of the Viennese modernists, with their conscious and dramatic attempts to depict their subject's inner feelings, represent an ideal example of how psychological and biological insights can enrich our relationship with art."

"Once I have gotten into a problem, I find it extremely helpful to get a complete perspective, to learn what earlier scientists thought about it. I want to see not only what lines of thought proved to be productive, but also where and why certain other directions proved to be unproductive."

"Reductionism can expand our vision and give us new insights into the nature and creation of art."

"The life of a biological scientist in the United States is a life of discussion and debate—it is the Talmudic tradition writ large. ...The egalitarian structure of American science encourages this camaraderie. ...this would not—could not—have taken place in the Austria, the Germany, the France, or perhaps even the England of 1955."

"Viennese life at the turn of the century provided opportunities in salons and coffeehouses for scientists, writers, and artists to come together in an atmosphere that was at once inspiring, optimistic, and politically engaged. ...science was no longer the narrow and restrictive province of scientists but had become an integral part of Viennese culture. ...a paradigm for how an open dialogue can be achieved."

"As astronomy and physics inspired the Enlightenment, so biology inspired Modernism. ...This new view led to a reexamination in art of the biological nature of human existence, as evident in Édouard Manet's Déjeuner sur l’Herbe... Manet's painting... reveals a theme... the complex relationship between the sexes and between fantasy and reality. ...also startlingly modern because of its style. Several decades before Cézanne began to collapse three dimension into two, Manet here had already flattened the viewer's sense of perspective..."

"The Copernican revolution... revealed that the earth is not the center of the universe... The second, the Darwinian revolution... revealed that we are not created divinely or uniquely but instead evolved from simpler animals by a process of natural selection. The third great revolution, the Freudian revolution of Vienna 1900, revealed that we do not consciously control our own actions but are instead driven by unconscious motives. This... later led to the idea that human creativity... stems from conscious access to underlying, unconscious forces."

"In the early 1960s, Kandel made the bold decision to conduct research on an unlikely animal, the large sea snail Aplysia californica. Kandel found this invertebrate attractive for neuroscience research because it has fewer and larger neurons than more traditional laboratory animals. This simple neural system would subsequently serve as an invaluable model for understanding the cellular basis of learning."

"Giacomo Rizzolatti... calls these "mirror neurons" and suggests that they provide the first insight into imitation, identification, empathy, and possibly the ability to mime vocalization—the mental processes intrinsic to human interaction. Vilayanur Ramachandran has found evidence of comparable neurons in the premotor cortex of people. ...one can see a whole new area of biology opening up... that can give us a sense of what makes us social, communicating beings. An ambitious undertaking of this sort might... teach us something about the factors that give rise to tribalism, which is so often associated with fear, hatred, and intolerance of outsiders."

"I was very much influenced by the psychology of Freud and by early workers in the field of learning and memory—James, Thorndike, Pavlov, Skinner, and Ulric Neisser. Their thinking, and even their errors, provided a wonderfully rich cultural background for my later work."

"I entered Harvard to become a historian and left to become a psychoanalyst, only to abandon both... to follow my intuition that the road to a real understanding of mind must pass through the cellular pathways of the brain."

"This dialogue between the ongoing research in brain science and art continue to this day. ...Such dialogues could help us explore the mechanisms in the brain that make perception and creativity possible, whether in art, the sciences, the humanities, or everyday life. In a larger sense, this dialogue could help make science part of our everyday experience."

"The Vienna School of Art History, influenced in part by Sigmund Freud's psychological work, began to develop a science-based psychology of art that was initially focused on the beholder. Today, the new science of mind has... again focused on the beholder."

"Much as Leonardo da Vinci and other Renaissance artists used the revelations of human anatomy to help them depict the body more accurately and compellingly, so, too, many contemporary artists may create new forms of representation in response to revelations about how the brain works."

"The Viennese Kultusgemeinde... was going bankrupt... European governments typically compensate Jewish agencies... but the Austrian government's compensation was not adequate. ...I owe my existence in the United States to the generosity of the Viennese Kultusgemeinde."

"I was astonished to discover that working in the laboratory—doing science in collaboration with interesting and creative people—is dramatically different from taking courses and reading about science."

"The idea that we are unaware of much of out mental life, first developed by Hermann Helmholtz, is central to psychoanalysis. Freud has added the interesting idea that although we are not aware of most instances of mental processing, we can gain conscious access... by paying attention."

"The remarkable insight that characterized Klimt's later work was contemporaneous with Freud's psychological studies and presaged the inward turn that would pervade all fields of inquiry in Vienna in 1900. This period... was characterized by the attempt to make a sharp break with the past and to explore new forms of expression in art, architecture, psychology, literature, and music. It spawned an ongoing pursuit to link these disciplines."

"Modernism began in the mid-nineteenth century as a response not only to the restrictions and hypocrisies of everyday life, but also as a reaction to the Enlightenment's emphasis on the rationality of human behavior. ...The founders of the Royal Society thought of God as a mathematician who had designed the universe according to logical and mathematical principles. The role of the scientist—the natural philosopher was to... decipher the codebook that God had used in creating the cosmos."

"The Modernist reaction to the Enlightenment came in the aftermath of the Industrial Revolution, whose brutalizing effects revealed that modern life had not become... mathematically perfect..."

"One of the characteristic features of Viennese life at this time was the continual, easy interaction of artists, writers, and thinkers with scientists."

"The realization that our mental functioning is largely irrational was arrived at by several thinkers at the same time, including Friedrich Nietzsche... Freud, who was much influenced by both Darwin and Nietzsche... was its most profound and articulate exponent. ...Schnitzler, Klimt, Kokoschka, and Schiele also discovered and explored new aspects of our unconscious mental life. They understood women better than Freud... and they saw more clearly than Freud the importance of an infant's bonding to its mother. They even realized the significance of the aggressive instinct earlier than Freud did. ...Plato discussed unconscious knowledge ...pointing out that much of our knowledge is inherent in the psyche in latent form. ...Hermann von Helmholtz... advanced the idea that the unconscious plays a critical role in human visual perception."

"Like other modern artists faced with the advent of the photography, Klimt sought newer truths that could not be captured by the camera. He... turned the artists view inward—away from the three-dimensional outside world and toward the multidimensional inner self and the unconscious mind."

"Throughout his career, Kandel has also been a student of the history of neuroscience. ...Kandel's fascination with the "giants" of neuroscience, as he calls them, became ironic when Kandel himself became a part of the history of neuroscience..."

"We now understand that every mental state and every mental disorder is a disorder of brain function. Treatments work by altering the structure and function of the brain."

"Cori Bargmann... has studied two variants of C. elegans... The only difference between the two is one amino acid in an otherwise shared receptor protein. Transferring the receptor from a social worm to a solitary worm makes the solitary worm social."

"The overarching ideas that have influenced my work and fueled my interest in conscious and unconscious memory derive from a perspective on mind that psychiatry and psychoanalysis opened up for me."

"It is much more meaningful and enjoyable to read the scientific literature about experiments you are involved in yourself than to read about science in the abstract."

"Nothing is more stimulating for self-education than working in a new area."

"Having been trained in history and the humanities, where one learns early on how depressing life can be, I am delighted to have ultimately switched to biology, where a delusional optimism still abounds."

"The intellectual life of turn-of-the-century Vienna is in my blood: my heart beats in three-quarter time."

"The Age of Insight is a product of my subsequent fascination with the intellectual history of Vienna from 1890 to 1918, as well as my interest in Austrian modernist art, psychoanalysis, art history, and the brain science that is my life's work. In this book I examine the ongoing dialogue between art and science that had its origins in fin-de-siècle Vienna..."

"I have at times felt alone, uncertain, without a well-trodden path to follow. Every time I embarked on a new course, there were well-meaning people... who advised against it. I had to learn early on to be comfortable with insecurity and to trust my own judgement on key issues."

"The function of the modern artist was not to convey beauty, but to convey new truths."

"I outline in simple terms... our current understanding of the cognitive psychological and neurobiological basis of perception, memory, emotion, empathy, and creativity. ...the principles of the viewer's response to art are applicable to all periods of painting."

"A brain scan may reveal the neural signs of depression, but a Beethoven symphony reveals what that depression feels like. Both perspectives are necessary if we are to fully grasp the nature of mind, yet they are rarely brought together."

"Pernkopf was only one of many Austrians who were "rehabilitated" in the postwar period. Their rehabilitation underscores the tendency of Austria to forget, suppress, and deny the events of the Nazi period. ...Anton Pelinka ...has called this phenomenon the "great Austrian taboo." It is precisely this moral vacuum that induced Simon Wiesenthal to establish his documentation center for Nazi war crimes in Austria, not Germany."

"The history of Austrian culture and scholarship in the modern era largely paralleled the history of Austrian Jewry."

"My hope is that the difference in the three generations' attitudes may signal a lessening of anti-Semitism in Austria."

"I continue to explore the science in which I work almost like a child, with naïve joy, curiosity, and amazement."

"...in various types of organisms, from snails to flies to mice to people. ...learning and memory, as well as synaptic and neuronal plasticity, represent a family of processes that share a common logic and some key components but vary in the details of their molecular mechanisms."

"I would like to develop a reductionist approach to the problem of attention by focusing on how place cells... create an enduring spatial map only when an organism is paying attention to its surroundings."

"CREB's opposing regulatory actions provide a threshold for memory storage, presumably to ensure that only important, life-serving experiences are learned. Repeated shocks to the tail are a significant learning experience for an Aplysia, just as, say, practicing the piano or conjugating French verbs are to us: practice makes perfect, repetition is necessary for long-term memory. In principle, however, a highly emotional state... could bypass the normal restraints on long-term memory. In such a situation, enough MAP kinase molecules would be sent into the nucleus rapidly enough to inactivate all of the CREB-2 molecules, thereby making it easy for protein kinase A to activate CREB-1 and put the experience directly into long-term memory."

"Even though I had long been taught that the genes of the brain are the governors of behavior, the absolute masters of our fate, our work showed that, in the brain as in bacteria, genes are also servants of the environment. ...An environmental stimulus... activates modulatory interneurons that release serotonin. The serotonin acts on the sensory neuron to increase cyclic AMP and to cause protein kinase A and MAP kinase to move to the nucleus and activate CREB. The activation of CREB, in turn, leads to the expression of genes that changes the function and the structure of the cell."