Gerald Edelman Quotes

Hayek made a quite fruitful suggestion, made contemporaneously by the psychologist Donald Hebb, that whatever kind of encounter the sensory system has with the world, a corresponding event between a particular cell in the brain and some other cell carrying the information from the outside word must result in reinforcement of the connection between those cells. These day, this is known as a Hebbian synapse, but von Hayek quite independently came upon the idea. I think the essence of his analysis still remains with us .

The computer is not, in our opinion, a good model of the mind, but it is as the trumpet is to the orchestra - you really need it. And so, we have very massive simulations in computers because the problem is, of course, very complex.

Your brain develops depending on your individual history. What has gone on in your own brain and its consciousness over your lifetime is not repeatable, ever - not with identical twins, not even with conjoined twins.

Consciousness may be seen as the haughty and restless second cousin of morphology. Memory is its mistress, perception its somewhat abused wife, logic its housekeeper, and language its poorly paid secretary

Brains operate ... not by logic but by pattern recognition. This process is not precise, as is logic and mathematics. Instead, it trades off specificity and precision, if necessary, to increase its range. It is likely, for example, that early human thought proceeded by metaphor, which, even with the late acquisition of precise means such as logic and mathematical thought, continues to be a major source of imagination and creativity in adult life.

A knowledge of brain science will provide one of the major foundations of the new age to come. That knowledge will spawn cures for disease, new machines based on brain function, further insights into our nature and how we know.

Many cognitive psychologists see the brain as a computer. But every single brain is absolutely individual, both in its development and in the way it encounters the world.

Hebb place the Law of Effect at the synaptic level by proposing a correlation model of synaptic modification similar to that of Hayek (1952). This work was seminal in providing a basis for many subsequent theoretical studies .

Science is imagination in the service of the verifiable truth, and that service is indeed communal. It cannot be rigidly planned. Rather, it requires freedom and courage and the plural contributions of many different kinds of people who must maintain their individuality while giving to the group.

Memory results from a process of continual re-categorization which, by its nature, must be procedural and involve continual motor activity and repeated rehearsal.

The analogy between the mind and a computer fails for many reasons. The brain is constructed by principles that assure diversity and degeneracy. Unlike a computer, it has no replicative memory. It is historical and value driven. It forms categories by internal criteria and by constraints acting at many scales, not by means of a syntactically constructed program. The world with which the brain interacts is not unequivocally made up of classical categories.

Each brain is exposed to different circumstances. It's very likely that your brain is unique in the history of the universe.