Community Corner
Community Update
Dr.
Eric
R. Kandel, the neuropsychiatrist who received the 2000 Nobel Prize in
physiology or medicine, will deliver the lecture, “The
Age of Insight: The Quest to Understand the Unconscious in Art, Mind and
Brain from Vienna 1900 to Present,” at 7 p.m. on Monday, Nov. 4, in the auditorium at Quinnipiac
University’s Center for Medicine, Nursing and Health Sciences on the
North Haven Campus.
The lecture is part of Quinnipiac’s year-long celebration of the Frank
H. Netter MD School of Medicine, which opened on the North Haven Campus
in August.
“In my talk, I will focus on how the new
biological science of mind has begun to engage with figurative art,” Kandel
said. “I will limit my discussion to one particular art form,
portraiture, in one particular cultural period, modernism in Vienna, 1900.”
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Kandel said portraiture is a highly suitable
art form for scientific exploration. “We now have the beginnings of an
intellectually satisfying understanding of how we respond to the facial
expressions and bodily postures of others,” he said.
Kandel said he will focus on the period
“Vienna 1900” because this artistic school of painters can be explored in
depth. “There are only three major artists, Klimt, Kokoschka and Schiele, yet
the school is important in the history of art both collectively and
individually,” he said. “Moreover, the concern of these artists with the truth
lying beneath surface appearances of their subjects was paralleled and
influenced by similar concerns with unconscious mental processes in
contemporaneous scientific medicine and psychoanalysis. Thus, the portraits of
the modernists, in Vienna 1900, also represent an ideal example of how
artistic, psychological and scientific insights can enrich one another.”
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Kandel
is a university professor and Fred Kavli Professor and director of the Kavli
Institute for Brain Science at the Columbia University College of Physicians
and Surgeons. He also is a
senior investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.
A graduate of Harvard College and the New York University School of Medicine,
Kandel trained in neurobiology at the National Institute of Health and in
psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. He joined the faculty of the College of
Physicians and Surgeons at Columbia University in 1974 as the founding director
of the Center for Neurobiology and Behavior.
At Columbia, Kandel organized the neuroscience curriculum. He is an editor of
“Principles of Neural Science,” the standard textbook in the field now in its 5th
edition. In 2006, Kandel wrote a book on the brain for the general public
entitled “In Search of Memory: The Emergence of a New Science of Mind,” which
won both the L.A. Times and U.S. National Academy of Science Awards for best
book in Science and Technology in 2008. A documentary film based on that book
is also entitled “In Search of Memory.”
In 2012, Kandel wrote “The Age of Insight: The Quest to Understand the
Unconscious in Art, Mind, and Brain, from Vienna 1900 to the Present,” which
won the Bruno-Kreisky Award in Literature, Austria's highest literary award.
Kandel’s research focuses on the molecular
mechanisms of memory storage in Aplysia and mice. More recently, he has studied
animal models in mice of memory disorders and mental illness.
This event is free and open to the public. For more information, call
203-582-8652.
Quinnipiac
is a private, coeducational, nonsectarian institution located 90 minutes north
of New York City and two hours from Boston. The university enrolls 6,400
full-time undergraduate and 2,300 graduate students in 58 undergraduate and
more than 20 graduate programs of study in its School
of Business and Engineering, School
of Communications, School
of Education, School
of Health Sciences, School
of Law, Frank
H. Netter MD School of Medicine, School
of Nursing and College
of Arts and Sciences. Quinnipiac consistently ranks among the top
regional universities in the North in U.S. News & World Report’s America’s
Best Colleges issue. The 2014 issue of U.S. News & World Report’s America’s
Best Colleges named Quinnipiac as the top up-and-coming school with master’s
programs in the Northern Region. Quinnipiac also is recognized in Princeton
Review’s “The Best 377 Colleges.” The Chronicle of Higher Education has named
Quinnipiac among the “Great Colleges to Work For.” For more information, please
visit www.quinnipiac.edu.
Connect with Quinnipiac on Facebook at www.facebook.com/quinnipiacuniversity
and follow Quinnipiac on Twitter @QuinnipiacU.