Gerald Edelman Quotes

#1. 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

Gerald Edelman

#2. Consciousness allows you the capacity to plan.

Gerald Edelman

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

Gerald Edelman

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

Gerald Edelman

#5. 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

#6. 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.

Gerald Edelman

#7. 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

#8. Early human thought proceeded by metaphor,

Gerald Edelman

#9. When finally substantiated by scientific means, such a view will allow an individual to see his place in the world with greater clarity
how he came from the world and how he may contribute to his fellows while he enjoys for a brief time the privilege of consciousness and communication.

Gerald Edelman

#10. 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

#11. 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

#12. 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

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

Gerald Edelman

#14. 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.

Gerald Edelman

#15. 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