Gerald Edelman Quotes

• 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.

  Gerald Edelman

  Brain, Encounters, Development

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

  Gerald Edelman

  Unique, Brain, Different

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• Evolution works by selection, not by instruction. There is no final cause, no teleology, no purpose guiding the overall process

  Gerald Edelman

  Causes, Finals, Purpose

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• We're inquiring into the deepest nature of our constitutions: How we inherit from each other. How we can change. How our minds think. How our will is related to our thoughts. How our thoughts are related to our molecules.

  Gerald Edelman

  Thinking, Mind, Molecules

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• 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.

  Gerald Edelman

  Over You, Brain, Gone

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• Consciousness allows you the capacity to plan.

  Gerald Edelman

  Consciousness, Capacity, Plans

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• 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.

  Gerald Edelman

  Brain, Age, Disease

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• 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.

  Gerald Edelman

  Memories, Mean, Diversity

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• 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.

  Gerald Edelman

  Thinking, Cells, Essence

  "Through a Computer Darkly: Group Selection and Higher Brain Function". Gerald Edelman, "Bulletin of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences", Volume 36, No. 1 (p. 25), www.jstor.org. October 1982.

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• Since the idea that modification of synaptic function can provide a basis for memory arose shortly after the first anatomical description of the synapse a number of models (Hebb 1949 . . Hayek 1952 . . Kendel 1981) have been proposed in which various cognitive activities are represented by combinations of the firing patterns of individual neurons.

  Gerald Edelman

  Memories, Ideas, Numbers

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• Most theoretical work since the proposals of Hebb (1949) and Hayek (1952) has relied upon particular forms of dependent synaptic rules in which either pre- or postsynaptic change is contingent upon closely occurring events in both neurons taking part in the synapse.

  Gerald Edelman

  Events, Neurons, Proposal

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• 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 . .

  Gerald Edelman

  Law, Levels, Study

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