Physicians From Austria

"Long-term potentiation helps stabalize the internal representation of space, and... attention, a defining feature of explicit memory storage, modulates the representation of space."

"Birds in which spatial memory is particularly important—those that store food at a large number of sites, for example—have larger hippocampuses than other birds. ...London taxi drivers have a larger hippocampus than others the same age. ...the size of their hippocampus continues to increase with time on the job."

"O'Keefe... argued that many forms of explicit memory (for example, memory for people and objects) use spatial coordinates... we typically remember people and events in a spatial context."

"Unlike vision, touch, or smell, which are prewired and based on Kantian a priori knowledge, the spatial map presents us with a new type of representation, one based on a combination of a priori knowledge and learning. The general capability for forming spatial maps is built into the mind, but the particular map is not. Unlike neurons in a sensory system, place cells are not switched on by sensory stimulation. Their collective activity represents the location where the animal thinks it is."

"Aspects of visual perception—motion, depth, form, and color—are segregated from one another and conveyed in separate pathways in the brain, where they are brought together and coordinated into a unified perception."

"Mountcastle discovered that tactile sensation is made up of several distinct modalities; for example, touch includes... hard pressure on the skin as well as a light brush... He found that each distinct submodality has its own private pathway within the brain and that this segregation is maintained at each relay..."

"Segregation occurs in the primary visual area of the cortex, which gives rise to two parallel pathways. ...the "what" pathway, carries information about the form of an object... the "where" pathway, carries information about the movement of the object in space: where the object is located."

"Implicit memory is responsible not only for simple perceptual and motor skills but also, in principle, for the pirouettes of Margot Fonteyn, the trumpeting techniques of Wynton Marsalis, the accurate ground strokes of Andre Agassi, and the leg movements of an adolescent. Implicit memory guides us through well-established routines that are not consciously controlled."

"CPEB is the first self-propogating form of a prion known to serve a physiological function... perpetuation of synaptic facilitation and memory storage."

"For all of us, explicit memory makes it possible to leap across space and time and conjure up events and emotional states that have vanished into the past yet somehow continue to live in our minds."

"The idea that different aspects of visual perception might be handled in separate areas of the brain was predicted by Freud at the end of the nineteenth century. ...a cortical defect that affected [the] ability to combine aspects of vision into a meaningful pattern. ...defects, which Freud called agnosias (loss of knowledge)..."

"In the Jacob-Monod model, signals from a cell's environment activate regulatory proteins that switch on the genes encoding particular proteins. This led [Philip] Goelet and me to wonder whether the crucial step in switching on long-term memory in sensitization might involve similar signals and similar gene regulatory proteins."

"What is learning but a set of sensory signals from the environment, with different forms of learning resulting from different types or patterns of sensory signals?"

"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."

"In the near future, neurobiology will address a matter of more general and fundamental importance: the biology of human mental processes. ...Psychology and psychiatry can illuminate and define for biology the mental functions that need to be studied if we are to have a meaningful and sophisticated understanding of the biology of the human mind."

"What strategy does the brain use to read itself out? That question, which is central to the unitary nature of conscious experience, remains one of the many unresolved mysteries of the new science of mind."

"The fact that a gene must be switched on to form a long-term memory shows clearly that genes are not simply determinants of behavior but are also responsive to environmental stimulation, such as learning."

"The same CREB switch is important for many forms of implicit memory in a variety of other species, from bees to mice to people."

"Exceptionally good memory exhibited by some people may stem from genetic differences in CREB-2 that limit the activity of this repressor protein in relation to CREB-1."

"Cajal revealed the precision of the interconnections between populations of individual nerve cells. Mountcastle, Hubel, and Wiesel revealed the functional significance of those patterns of interconnections. They showed that the connections filter and transform sensory information on the way to and within the cortex, and that the cortex is organized into functional compartments, or modules."

"For some representations of space the brain typically uses egocentric coordinates (centered on the receiver)... For other behaviors... the brain uses allocentric coordinates (centered on the world)."

"What biological processes enable me to review my own history with such emotional vividness?"

"Recall of memory is a creative process. What the brain stores is... only a core memory. Upon recall, this memory is then elaborated upon and reconstructed, with subtractions, additions, elaborations, and distortions."

"The firing of individual nerve cells involved in perceptual and motor processing is modified by attention and decision making."

"The growth and maintenance of new synaptic terminals makes memory persist. ...The ability to grow new synaptic connections as a result of experience appears to have been conserved throughout evolution. As an example... the cortical maps of the body surface are subject to constant modification in response to changing input from sensory pathways."

"Because we do not have a sensory organ dedicated to space, the representation of space is a quintessentially cognitive sensibility: it is the binding problem writ large."

"Jacob and Monod not only outlined a theory of gene regulation, they also discovered the first regulators of gene transcription. These regulators come in two forms—repressors, genes that encode the regulatory proteins that shut genes off, and as later work showed, activators, genes that encode the regulatory proteins that turn genes on."

"Each sensory system first analyzes and deconstructs, then restructures the raw, incoming information to its own built-in connections and rules—shades of Immanuel Kant."

"The Age of Insight is a product of my... 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. ...I examine the ongoing dialogue between art and science that had its origins in fin-de-siècle Vienna and document its three major phases."

"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."

"As knowledge advances and scientific disciplines change, so do the disciplines impinging on them."

"In the period from 1920 to 1960, psychiatry derived its main intellectual impetus from psychoanalysis. During this phase, its most powerful antidisciplines were philosophy and the social sciences. Since 1960, psychiatry has begun (again) to derive its main intellectual challenge from biology, with the result that neurobiology has been thrust into the position of the new antidiscipline for psychiatry."

"Five separate pulses of serotonin, designed to simulate five shocks to the tail, strengthened the synaptic connection for days and led to the growth of new synaptic connections... that did involve the synthesis of new protein."

"Jacques Monod... published a paper entitled "Genetic Regulatory Mechanisms in the Synthesis of Protein." Using bacteria as a model system, they made the remarkable discovery that genes can be regulated—that is, they can be switched on and off like a water faucet."

"Jacob and Monod found that in bacteria, genes are switched on and off by other genes. This led them to distinguish between effector genes and regulatory genes. Effector genes encode effector proteins... which mediate specific cellular functions. Regulatory genes encode proteins called regulatory proteins, which switch the effector genes on or off."

"A treatise on mental dietetics would be imperfect without some special notice of that most irrational and melancholy of all human torments, hypochondriasis. Reason, morality, wit, and even religion, have endeavoured by every possible means to exorcise this demon. By pamphlets and by books—in tragedy and in comedy — from the pulpit and on the stage, it has been denounced and ridiculed."

"Had Mephistopheles conferred no other service on Faust than easing him for a while of his cloak of learning, the doctor would have had little cause for despair. But the act of awaking is regulated by different principles from those which govern the act of going to sleep. In the former case, the hand of force is often necessary. Life points out with an iron staff the path which each individual should follow. Happy is the man who sees this staff, and follows the path; instead of tarrying by the way until weary, and, incapable of further exertion, he sinks bleeding to the ground. A high degree of mental culture, or a delicate tact, possessed by few, are required to distinguish the necessity of earnestness, or even of pain, in the midst of enjoyment."

"To correct the tribe of our younger poets we shall soon require the aid of a physician, not of a critic. Their history may be told in a few words. A young man educated, or rather mis-educated, without experience, without study, without any definite tendency, without the power of exertion, or of tasting any genuine enjoyment, becomes conscious of his miserable oscillation between existence and non-existence —between not having lived and not being about to live—between a barren past and a barren future. He now takes to novel reading, frequents the theatres, compares himself to heroes or poets, and makes verses. All on a sudden the thought flashes across his mind that his unhappy condition is connected with the unfilled profundity of his feelings—with an unsatisfied yearning of the soul. He rushes headlong into the ocean of melancholy, and indulges in expressions with which the poetic springs of latter years have inundated us; he bathes in these waters, and contemplates his own image reflected from their surface."

"“The greatest treasure that God can give his creatures is and ever will be—genuine existence". If these words of Herder be true, cultivation is the key to the most precious of treasures; for as Nature has insured the permanence of existence by implanting in us a force of resistance and self-renovation, so may we, on our side, increase the force of these attributes by self-acquired powers of mind."

"Those psychological observers who have accustomed themselves to consider the interior and exterior as intimately combined — as the inspiration and expiration of one living being— will readily understand and apprehend the views which I have here advanced. Not so those who are wont to regard mind and body as antagonistic entities associated in an arbitrary manner; or who adopt the prevailing opinion, that every enjoyment of man's sensual nature is detrimental to his spiritual being, or that the mind can only be cultivated at the expense of the body. Such a view would condemn the unfortunate mortal to an alternative of destruction in one form or another, from that creative force which every desire excites within him. But it may be asked, do not the frequent examples of sickness in the learned and the citizen, and of health in the illiterate and the peasant, confirm the opinion now alluded to? I answer that everything depends on our forming a correct idea of cultivation."

"As character comprises the entire sphere of the educated will, so temperament is nothing else than the sum of our natural inclinations and tendencies. Inclination is the material of the will, developing itself when controlled, into character, and when controlling, into passions. Temperament is, therefore, the root of our passions; and the latter, like the former, may be distinguished into two principal classes. Intelligent psychologists and physicians have always recognised this fact..."

"True philosophy is a living wisdom, for which there is no death."

"Composition, even when we have no idea of appearing in print, is an excellent dietetic tonic. ... The best and quickest mode of banishing a painful impression, or a torturing feeling, is to give it expression in words. We thus relieve the mind from present, and fortify it against future pangs."

"You must master an object before you attempt to despise it."

""He who wounds me" exclaims an animated writer, “ injures my body only: but he who wearies me assassinates my soul.” And he who wearies himself needs to be placed under a system of mental dietetics."

"The man dissatisfied with the world will be dissatisfied with himself, so as to be continually eaten up by his own ill humor. And in such a state of mind how can he retain health?"

"It is not enough to contemplate ourselves objectively; we must also treat ourselves objectively."

"We cannot avoid moodiness; but we may turn to account, as does the poet, the various dispositions of the mind, or give them form and shape, as the sculptor his marble."

"Our minds are so constituted that a change of objects brings nearly as much relief as actual repose."

"We have aimed at popularity in the best sense of that term. The truly popular writer never sinks into the vulgar crowd. He rather raises the masses by bringing the highest subjects within their comprehension, making them, without a show of erudition, easily understood"