Neuroscience, Clinical psychology, Philosophy, Literature, Classical Music

Beethoven, Mahler, Liszt, Chopin, Mozart, Wagner, Tchaikovsky, Mussorgsky, Rachmaninov

JORGE LUIS BORGES
"Any life is made up of a single moment, the moment in which a man finds out, once and for all, who he is."
"Democracy is an abuse of statistics."
"Every writer "creates" his own precursors. His work modifies our conception of the past, as it will modify the future."
"I cannot walk through the suburbs in the solitude of the night without thinking that the night pleases us because it suppresses idle details, just as our memory does."
"I foresee that man will resign himself each day to new abominations, and soon that only bandits and soldiers will be left."
"I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library."
"Life itself is a quotation."
"Like all those possessing a library, Aurelian was aware that he was guilty of not knowing his in its entirety."
"Nothing is built on stone; all is built on sand, but we must build as if the sand were stone."
"One concept corrupts and confuses the others. I am not speaking of the Evil whose limited sphere is ethics; I am speaking of the infinite."
"Reality is not always probable, or likely."
"The flattery of posterity is not worth much more than contemporary flattery, which is worth nothing."
"The original is unfaithful to the translation."
"Time is the substance from which I am made. Time is a river which carries me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger that devours me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire that consumes me, but I am the fire."
"To die for a religion is easier than to live it absolutely."
"To fall in love is to create a religion that has a fallible god."
"Writing is nothing more than a guided dream."

"......all behavior is the result of brain function. What we commonly call the mind is a set of operations carried out by the brain.
The actions of the brain underlie not only relatively simple motor behaviors such as walking or eating, but all the complex cognitive actions that we believe are quintessentially human, such as thinking, speaking, and creating works of art. As a corollary, all the behavioral disorders that characterize psychiatric illness—disorders of affect (feeling) and cognition (thought)— are disturbances of brain function.
The task of neural science is to explain behavior in terms of the activities of the brain. How does the brain marshal its millions of individual nerve cells to produce behavior, and how are these cells influenced by the environment, which includes the actions of other people?"
(ERIC KANDEL)
"Modern neural science represents a merger of molecular biology, neurophysiology, anatomy, embryology, cell biology, and psychology. Along with astute clinical observation, neural science has reinforced the idea first proposed by Hippocrates over two millennia ago that the proper study of mind begins with the study of the brain. Cognitive psychology and psychoanalytic theory have emphasized the diversity and complexity of human mental experience. Both disciplines recognize the importance of genetic as well as learned factors in determining behavior. By emphasizing functional mental structure and internal representation, psychoanalysis served as a source of modern cognitive psychology, a psychology that has stressed the logic of mental operations and of internal representations. Experimental cognitive psychology and clinical psychotherapy can now be strengthened by insights into the cellular neurobiology of behavior. The task for the years ahead is to produce a psychology that—though still concerned with problems of how internal representations are generated, with psychodynamics, and with subjective states of mind—is firmly grounded in empirical neural science."
(Eric Kandel)