M Edelman Quotes

The Nobel laureate and neuroscientist Gerald M. Edelman called your experiences “the remembered present.” Today, thanks to advances in neuroscience, we can see that Edelman was correct. An instance of a concept, as an entire brain state, is an anticipatory guess about how you should act in the present moment and what your sensations mean.12

Science has always tried to eliminate the subjective from its description of the world. But what if subjectivity itself is its subject?

Strange, now, how after so many years my mother’s model is starting to recede. Before I became a mother, I was a motherless daughter, and “motherless” always overshadowed “daughter” in that phrase. Now I’m a motherless mother, and “mother” is the word that carries most of the weight. Early loss influences me, daily, but it doesn’t define me anymore.

This, indeed, is the problem, the ultimate question, in neuroscience—and it cannot be answered, even in principle, without a global theory of brain function, one capable of showing the interactions of every level, from the micropatterns of individual neuronal responses to the grand macropatterns of an actual lived life. Such a theory, a neural theory of personal identity, has been proposed in the last few years by Gerald M. Edelman, in his theory of neuronal group selection, or “neural Darwinism.

Lucy also noted, “Nobody ever enjoyed their work more than we did.… Vivian and I had an absolute ball … [and] it showed, I think.… We did everything together happily. We used to have so much fun on the set. Seriously—not just the two of us giggling. I’m not talking about that. [We had fun] by making things evolve, making things work out, making what the writers had written come to life.

In 1986, I read a remarkable article by Israel Rosenfield in The New York Review of Books in which he discussed the revolutionary work and views of Gerald M. Edelman. Edelman was nothing if not bold. “We are at the beginning of