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What it argues
In Search of Memory is Eric Kandel's autobiography interleaved with the history of neuroscience, organized around his own central scientific achievement: the cellular and molecular mechanisms of memory storage in the sea slug Aplysia. Kandel won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2000 for this work. The book is his account of how he came to the question of memory, what the science showed, and what it means for our understanding of who we are.
The autobiography begins in Vienna, where Kandel was born into a Jewish family in 1929 and from which his family escaped just before World War II. The experience of Kristallnacht — being expelled from their apartment by a Nazi neighbor while he watched, at the age of nine — became for Kandel a defining puzzle: how could ordinary people become perpetrators of such violence? The question drove an early interest in psychology and psychoanalysis, which he pursued at Harvard before concluding that the reductionist tools of biology offered more tractable paths to understanding the mind.
What it gets right
- 1.
Long-term memory requires gene expression and the growth of new synaptic connections, not just changes in synaptic strength. This distinction between short- and long-term memory has profound biological implications.
- 2.
Kandel's choice to work on Aplysia — a simple organism with large, identifiable neurons — exemplifies the reductionist strategy: find the simplest system in which a phenomenon occurs.
- 3.
Synaptic plasticity — the ability of synaptic connections to strengthen or weaken based on activity — is the physical basis of learning and memory in all animals studied so far.
What it covers
Who wrote it
Eric R. Kandel is a neuroscientist and professor at Columbia University's Zuckerman Institute for Mind, Brain and Behavior. He was born in Vienna in 1929 and emigrated to the United States with his family in 1939. His research on the cellular and molecular mechanisms of memory storage in Aplysia earned him the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2000. His other books include Principles of Neural Science (the standard graduate neuroscience textbook, co-authored), The Age of Insight, and Reductionism in Art and Brain Science. He is widely considered one of the most important neuroscientists of the twentieth century.
