In Search of Memory: The Emergence of a New Science of Mind

This is an extraordinary book about neuroscience , physiology, molecular biology and neurobiology and also about people and history. I bought the book with the intention to satisfy my curiosity in the latest developments in the science of mind. I was ready to handle an experience of reading through dry, complex theories and do some hard work of extracting information that I can make sense with my limited knowledge. Surprisingly, the book has none of that; it is written so well, as if it is the transcript of an one on one conversation between friends, so captivating, so clear and so human. I could not let go of it, reading until small hours when reluctantly, I had to go to sleep so next day I could show up at work in a reasonable shape. The book interweaves threads of science, personal life stories, career, friends, Jewish history, Nobel prize ceremony and biotechnology. The main story is about neuroscience, with emphasis on personal scientific work that culminated with Nobel prize award in 2000. The book can be divided in following sections: personal life, history of neuroscience and molecular biology, short term memory, long term memory, complex behavior and DNA, consciousness, mental illnesses, the experience of receiving Nobel prize, Austria and its relationship with Jewish community in the past and today and an insight analysis of trends in biotechnology from a business point of view. The book is focused on the biology of short term and long term memory. Eric does an excellent job explaining the evolution of neuroscience up to the point when he started his career, so the reader has a good understanding of contemporary issues and of the formation of neurobiology. I liked a lot the fact that Eric Kandel kept the level of detail in balance and put the explanations in the perspective of human evolution. I loved how he classifies the mechanisms of learning as being either Kantian or Lockean: we are a combination of genetics and learned life experience. It is this philosophical approach that is constantly felt through the whole book that gave me a sense of direction and purpose of his work. His logic is very neutral (objective), in the sense that he refers to our mind as the result of an evolution based on laws of physics, chemistry and genetics. This is a stark contrast with the approach of psychoanalysts during most part of the 20th century that puts so much emphasis on personal interpretation based on patient confessions that transcends biological reality . This is another aspect of the book that astounded me: despite the fact that he is so methodical about deciphering the way the mind works using a reductionist approach, thus implying that mind is a complex and large collection of simple neuronal structures, he is so human when he talks about his family and friends. He talks a great deal in an emotional way (happy, sad or humorous) about his friends, mentors, colleagues and students. His emotions, infinitely more complex than any of Aplysia's rituals, in a way, are a reminder of the huge work that still needs to be done until we will understand how our neurons can create such sophisticated behavior. The book talks in great detail about the structure and functions of neurons, with lots of details about how electrical and chemical signals work at the synaptic level. Eric Kandel did a great job describing the molecular and ionic hypothesis, signaling, protein manufacturing, genetics and their role in memory. However, I thought that it helped me a lot my prior understanding of how genes expression works, because the book does not provide much assistance in that area. This is especially important for readers who are more interested in aspects of long term memory and complex human behavior. I found fascinating the section dedicated to consciousness. As usual, Eric takes the reader through the history of genetics and then spending more pages on the work of Francis Crick and Christof Koch and current developments. Eric closes his book with a personal analysis of the current state of the science of mind, what is next and his sharing with the readers of how one should plan a career in general, based on his personal experience. Excellent book!

I bought this book when it was first published but for some reason got distracted while reading it the first time and put it down. Luckily i recently decided to pick it up again- the book is fantastic. In search of Memory is a mixture of autobiography and science. The author constructs the book around his own history and his own motivation both for study of memory. The book is split into 6 sections with the first and last focused on personal history and the middle four focused on the author's work. All is engaging and readible and highly recommended, I will give a brief overview of the sections. In the first section the author describes his childhood in Vienna with the Nazi invasion and the persecution he and his family faced- he describes the hardships faced and the journey taken to go to the US. In this section the stage is set to pose the questions about how memory works. In particular, how memories can be so clear so far from the date of experience in certain situations and where this permanence is formed and stored is pondered. Though few can empathize with the author's experience all can sympathize with the questions about the basis for memory. The author works chronologically and goes through his early history working with biological and neurological questions. Practical neuroscience and biological problems are considered and so is the authors journey that took him to study the right system to consider memory. The author throughout the book makes it a point to argue that finding the right simple system to analyze that can give broader implication is at the heart of putting oneself in a position to make progress. The author settled on the sea slug Aplysia. So too are discussed were the experience of the author in first monitoring of action potentials in the squid nervous system. A creature with nerve cells relatively easy to monitor. The author moves onto trying to monitor change in the nervous system after becoming comfortable with the Aplysia's biology. Reflex behaviour is studied and the monitoring of nerve cells is examined when presented with various stimulus. The chemical reactions that take place within the cell and the neurotransmitters that are associated are discussed and in particular the mechanics of short term memory adaptation and implication to behaviour are discussed in detail through the results of experiments done. The author continues on to pose questions about long term memory and how short term and long term though different, must be associated somehow. The mechanics for this are not understood but insight is provided by the author and the subject matter is fascinating. The author continues in complexity and starts to discuss things like perception and spacial awareness. Spacial awareness is definitely an arena to explore how memory works given our spacial awareness and that of most creatures is a function of nature in initial architecture as well as environment which determines how the memory implicit in a mental map is formed. This process is being explored in current science and the idea of paying attention is also discussed. The author moves on to modern biomedical progress and how understanding memory processes in mice has provided a means to develop insight and treatment into memory related diseases. The author discusses how biology is an incredibly important part for the future of psychiatry. In particular the rigour of science should be applied to psychiatry to get an objective measure of results. Interaction of people is shown to be very important for developement and treatment is not chemistry when it comes to social disorders and mental disorders like depression and schizophrenia. The author also walks through some of his thoughts on the collaboration of the private and public sector in the field of pharmaceuticals. The author concludes with his receiving of the Nobel prize. It is a return to the autobiographical aspect of the book and the author describes how he revisited Vienna and some of the discourse engaged in while there. It is a reasonable end to an otherwise fascinating and informative book.

This is a wonderful book, but it is actually two books in one. It is the autobiography of a Nobel laureate and, along the way, a history of modern studies of the brain and memory. Kandel and his family escape Nazi Vienna and come to New York. He studies medicine, intending to be a psychoanalyst, but then discovers the new science of the mind—molecular biology, neuroscience and cognitive psychology. He makes brilliant strides through the in-depth study of a particular creature, Aplysia, a large sea snail. As his new life unfolds in the United States (principally at Columbia), so does the study of the brain and the two become inextricably linked. Initially studying the humanities, Kandel is, like most wise people, broadly educated. One of the ongoing themes of In Search of Memory is the manner in which dry neuroscience anticipates and reinforces wet neuroscience. Humor theory in antiquity and the renaissance . . . the empiricism of the British philosophers . . . the Kantian ‘categories’ . . . the hypothetical, abstract constructs of Freud . . . all find some degree of confirmation in the discoveries and tentative conclusions of laboratory scientists in the 20th and 21st centuries. The writing is very lucid and even when the story becomes increasingly complex, with the discovery of additional neurotransmitters and electro/chemical processes, non-scientific readers are able to follow the exposition and line of argument. The book also looks to the future, with the daunting challenges of understanding consciousness and the teasing possibilities of integrating neuroscience with such fields as sociology. Kandel is likable, engaging, and courageous, as when he presses contemporary Austrians to come to terms with their complicity in National Socialism and the holocaust. He is a cultured man, complementing his knowledge of science with his love of the arts and music. He is also a generous man, sharing the limelight with collaborators and colleagues. In some passages his autobiography constitutes an examination of the sociology, economy and ethos of those who do serious science. If you are interested in following the life of a very interesting man as well as following the course of modern neuroscience, this would be an ideal place to start. It is also rich in its illustrations and it includes a 20+ page glossary which is very, very helpful. Highly recommended.

Although billed as a memoir, this well annotated and indexed book probably tells more about psychological/neurological research than about the author's life. Although titled "In Search of Memory," it probably tells more about Kandel's life and times than it does about how memory works. In between, you will find some interesting and enlightening insights regarding the scientific community and how it works. The book is well written, mostly in a friendly, conversational tone, with complex matters reduced to easily understandable discussions. However, if you are hoping to find out how your memory works, you will be disappointed. In fact, there is not much to tell because by the end of his research career, as least as documented here, only the most rudimentary mechanisms have, as yet, been discovered. Nobody really has a clue as to how minds learn and store information as elaborate pictures and complex sets of data. Something I found surprisingly paradoxical however, in reading between the lines, is the fallibility of the author's own thinking. In spite of the nature of his lifelong work and his Nobel Prize winning genius, in the next to last chapter Kandel goes off on Austria for sins of the last century with a sort of tribalism that is probably very similar to that which engendered the anti-Semitic behavior which he obviously still finds mightily upsetting. I would have expected Kandel's psychological expertise and curiosity about the "science of mind" to have been enabled him to rise above that, realizing that what happened so many years ago in Vienna was not really about Austrian Nazis and Jews, but rather about a particularly atrocious aspect of our human nature. Kandel briefly touches on the mental processes that lead to the kind of fallibility George Soros writes about in his book, The Age of Fallibility: Consequences of the War on Terror , and talks about how the fruits of mind research might someday soon bring solutions to problems such as schizophrenia, Parkinson's and Alzheimer's. But it evidently hasn't yet occurred to him that our common acceptance of tribalism and its often heartbreaking consequences might well be a genetic defect more worthy of his urgent attention than any of these. This chapter, probably not by intention, reveals a penchant in the terribly complex and awesomely powerful machine we call "mind" for imagination and emotionalism to prevail over reason and rational thinking. With his being unable to offer any promise of new understandings of the mind and how it does what it does, one is left with the sinking feeling that the prospects for his search for memory ever leading to a better life for mankind are dim indeed, and that something better is perhaps utterly unachievable.

The story of Eric Kandel begins in Vienna when his family was dispossessed and deported - he and his brother escaped to America while his parents were murdered in the concentration camps. The scientific biography begins in the early 1970s when studies by Kandel and others first linked cellular neurobiology with the science of learning, thus creating a new molecular science of behavior. In 1983 the Howard Hughes Medical Institute asked Schwartz, Axel and Kandel to form the nucleus of a group devoted to the science of mind - or molecular cognition thus founding what is possibly the most exciting field of research in the world today. Over a period of about 40 years Kandel made many interesting discoveries about the brain, with his most important assistant - the sea snail Aplysia - which taught him how memories are created and stored through repetition, the function of synapses and about the plasticity of the brain. Eric Kandel's original intention was to study psychoanalysis and he worked closely with cognitive psychologists, who he says were driven by two underlying assumptions: 1. The brain is born with prior knowledge 2. The brain achieves its analytical triumphs by developing an internal representation of the external world - a cognitive map As cognitive psychologists worked with brain scientists to investigate these assumptions, cognitive neural science was born, which focused on the biology of internal representation. This draws heavily on two lines of inquiry: the electro physical study of how sensory information is represented in the minds of animals (such as Aplysia) and the imaging of sensory and other complex internal representations in the brains of "intact, behaving human beings." The researchers found that the visual cortex deconstructs messages and then reconstructs them. In other words, our perceptions are illusory. As Kandel put it: "The brain does not simply take the raw data that it receives through the senses and reproduce it faithfully, instead, each sensory system first analyses, deconstructs, and then restructures the raw incoming information according to its own built-in connections and rules." Kandel thus became intrigued about how information about motion, depth, colour and form, which is carried by separate pathways, is organized into a cohesive perception. According to the cognitive neural science researchers, the "cohesive perception" is far different from the literal solid reality that many take for granted. Some people, for instance cannot recognize depth of field, so their whole world is two dimensional, others cannot recognize faces (The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat). These exceptions make us realize what a remarkable experience it is just to live our ordinary every day lives. "Merely recognizing a person is an amazing computational achievement," said Kandel. "All of our perceptions - seeing, hearing, smelling and touching - are analytical triumphs." Eric Kandel describes the sensory systems as hypothesis generators saying we confront the world neither directly nor precisely. "The central neuron is a story-teller with regard to the nerve fibers, and it is never completely trustworthy, allowing distortions of quality and measure...sensation is an abstraction, not a replica of the real world." It is interesting to find such 21st century scientific support for the views expressed so long ago by the Existentialists and the Buddhists - namely that there is no reality only illusion. After nearly half a century of exploring the human brain, Eric Kandel's sense of wonder was undiminished. As each mystery was solved, another would present itself. He offered no simple conclusions at the end of the book, but rather pointed out that many unknowns still remain, such as the whereabouts of the seat of consciousness. When I finished the book I felt intrigued and happy that not only inside the heads of human beings but inside those of the simplest creatures, lies an incredible piece of apparatus - the brain.

I read the reviews and am interested in Hyper Learning; thought this book would be interesting, but I am having a hard time getting into it. It's a hard read for me. I plan on continuing to read it in small chunks in order to fully understand what I'm reading.

Here, I summarize my thoughts on three books by Eric Kandel: The Disordered Mind, In Search of Memory, and Reductionism in Art and Brain Science: Bridging the Two Cultures. Eric Kandel is a great American scientist and winner of the Nobel Prize. Interestingly, he started his career as a humanities major at Harvard, and he writes very much in that tradition. The books cover various topics, including psychiatric disorders such as schizophrenia, the molecular basis of memory, and the relationship between the subconscious and art, and incorporate his recollections of his life journey and world history, particularly related to Vienna. While the books focus on different things, they all look at different aspects of the same subject, like taking different views of one elephant. When discussing psychiatric diseases, I like how Dr. Kandel described the root causes and history of schizophrenia and autism. These diseases trace much of their early history to Vienna and some famous early brain scientists there, such as Kraepelin and Asperger. Within the topic of memory, I liked Dr. Kandel's reflection on how memory is stored in synapses from inhibitory and excitatory neurons, and, in parallel fashion, these synaptic memories turn into molecular events and gene expression through activating and repressing transcription factors of the CREB family. Kandel also talks about his own memories. It was striking how Vienna was such a center of scholarship in the early 20th century and so quickly fell into tragedy with the advent of the Nazis and has changed dramatically since then. Finally, I enjoyed reading about Dr. Kandel's relationship between the subconscious and art. He talked about how many recent artists have tried to move beyond the conscious representation of the figure and harness their subconscious and how abstract art can play into our deep mental processes, such as face recognition. Overall, I found these books very interesting reads that give an encompassing picture of both the mind and a great person.

In Search of Memory is one of the best books I have read this year. It combines autobiography, with an elegant and simple explanation of scientific and neurologic materials. It also reads like a "Who's Who" of neuroscience. Eric Kandel can write, tell a tale, and give insight into a variety of topics. He detailed his personal story from being a child in Austria, leaving after Kristallnacht 1938, and finding his path in life. He explains Kristallnacht and the implications of its impact on mankind. I appreciated his inclusion of his memories as an Austrian Jewish child fleeing the country, and his return visits during his adult life where he brought his insight forward into the political realm. He wove his personal and professional stories intricately detailing his very exceptional life. For example, Dr. Kandel writes a detailed account of the events leading up to, during and after his trip to Sweden to accept the Nobel Prize, with two other colleagues, during 2000. Therein lies a great human interest story, as well as, description of international celebrity. The author shares with his reader, that he has an interest in why people do what they do, how they remember and what makes science. He writes extremely well, chronicling his journey with historical, political, psychological, and scientific backdrops. I was very impressed and impacted by the variety of photos included from his personal collection, as well as, explanatory diagrams and educational materials; an Index, Notes and Sources, and an excellent Glossary. While reading In Search of Memory, I bookmarked extensively, and kept thinking of all the people that I would give this to, as a gift. This is a superb book. I liked the quote that captured it all, in three sentences: "Few can interlace their autobiography with the evolution of a scientific paradigm. Even fewer can weave such a story seamlessly. Eric Kandel is one of these." Yadin Dudai, Nature.

In Search of Memory is a wonderful journey with Eric Kandel. One learns about the trauma of nine years old child, who later explores how these traumatic memories are storedin the brain. And earns the Nobel Prize. The other issue before Kandel was to answer how does a most educated society gets infected by processes of Aryanization. For which he has only partial answer.

La obra del Dr. Kandel es fascinante, el medio del envío no fue el mejor, llegó en un sobre que rompieron de una esquina para ver el contenido y por tanto los bordes del libro se dañaron ligeramente

This is the book you need to read to easily understand the underpinnings of psychiatry and know how important biology in its simplest form is to explain mind and the foundation of our genes and DNA.

Der Nobelpreisträger Eric Kandel verknüpft auf anziehende Weise seine persönliche Biographie mit der Aufdeckung der biologischen Grundlagen des menschlichen Geistes, an der einen wesentlichen Anteil hatte. Man bekommt ein Gefühl, wenn auch kein tiefgründiges Verständnis, für das Netzwerk zellulärer und biochemischer Funktionen, das das Gedächtnis ausmacht. Das liegt zum Einen daran, dass das Buch notwendigerweise populärwissenschaftlich geschrieben ist, um die Zielgruppe zu erreichen, und andererseits daran, dass trotz der beeindruckenden Fortschritte der letzten 70 Jahre noch immer viele Zusammenhänge im Verborgenen liegen. Das Buch ist aber durchaus geeignet, den Eindruck zu erwecken, dass das Gehirn doch geeignet ist, seine eigene Komplexität zu verstehen und zu entziffern. Neben einer vielzahl interessanter naturwissenschaftlicher Anektdoten, Fakten und Vorgehensweisen wird auch die Arbeitsweise des amerikanischen Wissenschaftssystems angerissen. Ein hervorzuhebender Nebenaspekt, der das Buch stark bereichert und zum "Pageturner" macht, ist die immer wieder eingeschobene Darstellung der Kindheit in Wien, die Auswanderung der jüdischen Familie in die USA in der Zeit des Anschlusses Österreichs an das Deutsche Reich, die besondere Stellung der jüdischen Kultur für Eric Kandel über sein gesamtes Leben und Wirken und der Bogen in die 2000er, in denen Eric Kandel versucht, die geschichtliche Aufarbeitung der österreichischen Verantwortung für den Aufstieg und das Wirken der Nationalsozialisten durch seine inzwischen herausragende Stellung voran zu treiben. Die von ihm angeführten Literaturstellen, die dieses Thema aufgreifen bzw. durch zeitgenössische romanhafte Erzählung vergegenwärtigen, aber auch die Zitate philosophischer und psychiatrischer Grundlagenliteratur, sind ebenfalls durchaus lesenwert.

Erik Kandel won the Nobel Prize for his path-breaking work on the cerebral mechanisms that produce memory. In this popular science book, he offers an illuminating description of his own research spanning several decades in relation to the general advancement of the topic. He knows how to use simple pictures to convey the key points and the reader learns painlessly quite a lot about his own brain and how his own mind functions. Moreover, Kandel blends his own memories with his narrative, from his beloved Vienna that his family had to leave when the Nazis took over, to New York, where he spent the rest of his life.