Eric R Kandel

In search of memory

In Search of Memory is Eric R Kandel's account of his life as a scientist studying the workings of the brain, but as well as giving details of his own investigations he includes the relevant scientific background, thus making the book a useful resource for learning about this subject. The autobiographical approach helps to make the science more accessible, and it also shows how success as a scientist often depends what you choose to study - choices that may be difficult and against the advice of your colleagues (such as using the marine snail Aplysia for the study of memory), but which in Kandel's case lead to him being awarded the 2000 Nobel Prize in physiology and medicine.

The autobiographical approach means that the book is not really suitable for those wanting an overview of recent neuroscience- its more suited to those wanting to see how our understanding of the brain has progressed. In particular it illustrates the two sides of the study of the brain - the psychoanalytic approach (Kandel started his career as a psychoanalyst) and the more reductionist approach of studying the biology and chemistry of the brain, which formed the basis of his scientific research. Kandel shows how these two approaches may at long last become reunited.

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Paperback 528 pages
ISBN: 0393329372
Salesrank: 11746
Weight:1.2 lbs

Published: 2007 W. W. Norton & Company

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Paperback 528 pages
ISBN: 0393329372
Salesrank: 45689
Weight:1.2 lbs

Published: 2007 W. W. Norton & Co.

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Paperback 528 pages
ISBN: 0393329372
Salesrank: 39844
Weight:1.2 lbs

Published: 2007 WW Norton

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Product Description
“A stunning book.”—Oliver Sacks Charting the intellectual history of the emerging biology of mind, Eric R. Kandel illuminates how behavioral psychology, cognitive psychology, neuroscience, and molecular biology have converged into a powerful new science of mind. This science now provides nuanced insights into normal mental functioning and disease, and simultaneously opens pathways to more effective healing. Driven by vibrant curiosity, Kandel’s personal quest to understand memory is threaded throughout this absorbing history. Beginning with his childhood in Nazi-occupied Vienna, In Search of Memory chronicles Kandel’s outstanding career from his initial fascination with history and psychoanalysis to his groundbreaking work on the biological process of memory, which earned him the Nobel Prize. A deft mixture of memoir and history, modern biology and behavior, In Search of Memory traces how a brilliant scientist’s intellectual journey intersected with one of the great scientific endeavors of the twentieth century: the search for the biological basis of memory.

Product Description

“A stunning book.”—Oliver Sacks Charting the intellectual history of the emerging biology of mind, Eric R. Kandel illuminates how behavioral psychology, cognitive psychology, neuroscience, and molecular biology have converged into a powerful new science of mind. This science now provides nuanced insights into normal mental functioning and disease, and simultaneously opens pathways to more effective healing.

Driven by vibrant curiosity, Kandel’s personal quest to understand memory is threaded throughout this absorbing history. Beginning with his childhood in Nazi-occupied Vienna, In Search of Memory chronicles Kandel’s outstanding career from his initial fascination with history and psychoanalysis to his groundbreaking work on the biological process of memory, which earned him the Nobel Prize.

A deft mixture of memoir and history, modern biology and behavior, In Search of Memory traces how a brilliant scientist’s intellectual journey intersected with one of the great scientific endeavors of the twentieth century: the search for the biological basis of memory.

Mental Midgets *
In Search of Memory is a book to avoid. Eric Kandel is a Phd scientist with a Nobel prize who wrote a book packed with random meanderings about his personal life and his research into the subject of memory. Unfortunately, Dr. Kandel has neither the ability to write nor anything to write about. I expected to find out what scientists know currently about the human brain and how that brain becomes a conscious entity. If that is your expectation, don't look for it in this book. His use of the jargon used to describe parts of the brain is about as close as he gets to presenting anything factual. Forget this book and look for something else to read.

Mental Midgets *

In Search of Memory is a book to avoid. Eric Kandel is a Phd scientist with a Nobel prize who wrote a book packed with random meanderings about his personal life and his research into the subject of memory.

Unfortunately, Dr. Kandel has neither the ability to write nor anything to write about. I expected to find out what scientists know currently about the human brain and how that brain becomes a conscious entity. If that is your expectation, don't look for it in this book. His use of the jargon used to describe parts of the brain is about as close as he gets to presenting anything factual. Forget this book and look for something else to read.

Great science, Excellent Writer *****
Eric Kandel has created a surprisingly personal and touching book with In Search of Memory. I found it remarkable that he is not only a world renowned scientist and a talented technical writer, but he is a very gifted writer that I could imagine writing on other subjects. On this subject, neural science and memory, Kandel is obviously an expert having one a Nobel Prize related to his work on the subject. His work over 50+ years is fascinating. I took a depth of knowledge away from the book about the new science of the mind. On the subject of his personal life, I learned surprising new lessons about WWII, Vienna, and Austria's place in the persecutions of the Jewish people. I felt this additional dimension to the book was wonderful. This is one of the best science related books I have read, and it also a great autobiography and history lesson.

Great science, Excellent Writer *****

Eric Kandel has created a surprisingly personal and touching book with In Search of Memory. I found it remarkable that he is not only a world renowned scientist and a talented technical writer, but he is a very gifted writer that I could imagine writing on other subjects. On this subject, neural science and memory, Kandel is obviously an expert having one a Nobel Prize related to his work on the subject. His work over 50+ years is fascinating. I took a depth of knowledge away from the book about the new science of the mind. On the subject of his personal life, I learned surprising new lessons about WWII, Vienna, and Austria's place in the persecutions of the Jewish people. I felt this additional dimension to the book was wonderful.

This is one of the best science related books I have read, and it also a great autobiography and history lesson.

Attempting to discover the mysteries of the Human memory *****
Eric Kandel has the gift of unpacking the complexities/intricacies of the brain and mind to the basics in which the lay person with an elementary biology would understand. Kandel starts his book with his life as a Jewish child and how he developed his obsession with memory. What actually amazed me about Kandel was his ability to teach you neuroscience by reading his book without him actually being there with you. I will not detailed what I learned from this book in this review. However, if you are a person looking for inspiration, knowledge about neuroscience and experiments being done to improve mental illnesses, I highly encourage you to read this book. It is stunning! This author truly deserved the Nobel prize.

Attempting to discover the mysteries of the Human memory *****

Eric Kandel has the gift of unpacking the complexities/intricacies of the brain and mind to the basics in which the lay person with an elementary biology would understand. Kandel starts his book with his life as a Jewish child and how he developed his obsession with memory. What actually amazed me about Kandel was his ability to teach you neuroscience by reading his book without him actually being there with you. I will not detailed what I learned from this book in this review. However, if you are a person looking for inspiration, knowledge about neuroscience and experiments being done to improve mental illnesses, I highly encourage you to read this book. It is stunning! This author truly deserved the Nobel prize.

Our illusionary minds - a journey into the centre of the brain *****
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.

Our illusionary minds - a journey into the centre of the brain *****

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.

Amazing read *****
Fantastic book by that cliche - a brilliant scientist. Biographical details served well to illustrate the foreground detail for me.

Amazing read *****

Fantastic book by that cliche - a brilliant scientist. Biographical details served well to illustrate the foreground detail for me.

In my Listmania for this subject *****
This one is well worth your time if you are interested in the science behind memory. Detailing his story intertwined with the narrative of progressive discovery, its a sit down with a cup of tea book that isn't afraid to dig into quite some depth, albeit in places and briefly. Reading this also introduces you to how a scientist might really be thinking when he meanders his way along the road to the discoveries that we get on a platter at the end of it. What I find fascinating about the whole subject is that a book such as this hands the intelligent reader a mans life work on a platter and makes it easily understood. The work in reality fills a number of rather sizable text books at the least not to mention innumerable papers etc. If you've got a shelf on the brain at home that you read through, add this to it :).

In my Listmania for this subject *****

This one is well worth your time if you are interested in the science behind memory. Detailing his story intertwined with the narrative of progressive discovery, its a sit down with a cup of tea book that isn't afraid to dig into quite some depth, albeit in places and briefly. Reading this also introduces you to how a scientist might really be thinking when he meanders his way along the road to the discoveries that we get on a platter at the end of it.

What I find fascinating about the whole subject is that a book such as this hands the intelligent reader a mans life work on a platter and makes it easily understood. The work in reality fills a number of rather sizable text books at the least not to mention innumerable papers etc.

If you've got a shelf on the brain at home that you read through, add this to it :).

In Search of Memory: The Emergence of a New Science of Mind *****
An inspiring book, by one of the great pioneers in the subject of how neurons learn. Apart from giving us an easy to comprehend, authoritative and extremely interesting account of experiments relating to this subject, Kandel tells us a great deal about his fascinating and moving life story, and how this was responsible for the orientation of his experiments. In this way, the book gives us insights into the human face of science and, in doing so, provides a context to the scientific findings described, which makes them easier understand and evaluate. In particular, it helps to know that, when the author was making detailed investigations of a single neuron of a sea slug, what he was really interested in was what he had motivated him from the beginning, namely, trying to explain the ruthless human behaviour that he and his family saw at first-hand in pre-war Nazi Austria. From the beginning, much influenced by his family's contacts with pioneer Viennese Psychiatrists, he had been interested in global aspects of the Science of Mind, and it is to these grand issues that he returned in his later years, and with which the last chapters of his book are concerned. In these, he tells us how far he and his fellow researchers have got in pushing forward their understanding of this vast subject. Inevitably, the outcomes are more suggestive than definitive, but the progress of science depends on provoking thought. In all, a splendid read.

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

An inspiring book, by one of the great pioneers in the subject of how neurons learn. Apart from giving us an easy to comprehend, authoritative and extremely interesting account of experiments relating to this subject, Kandel tells us a great deal about his fascinating and moving life story, and how this was responsible for the orientation of his experiments. In this way, the book gives us insights into the human face of science and, in doing so, provides a context to the scientific findings described, which makes them easier understand and evaluate. In particular, it helps to know that, when the author was making detailed investigations of a single neuron of a sea slug, what he was really interested in was what he had motivated him from the beginning, namely, trying to explain the ruthless human behaviour that he and his family saw at first-hand in pre-war Nazi Austria. From the beginning, much influenced by his family's contacts with pioneer Viennese Psychiatrists, he had been interested in global aspects of the Science of Mind, and it is to these grand issues that he returned in his later years, and with which the last chapters of his book are concerned. In these, he tells us how far he and his fellow researchers have got in pushing forward their understanding of this vast subject. Inevitably, the outcomes are more suggestive than definitive, but the progress of science depends on provoking thought. In all, a splendid read.

very informative and even entertaining *****
A fabulous book from a distinguished scientist who has spent his career in search of memory. Part memoir, part history of neuroscience, and part pop science account, this is definitely an informative and even an entertaining read. It is filled with colorful characters from the past and present of neuroscience, some famous, some primarily known within their particular field of research. One of these colorful characters was Alden Spencer, who was one of Kandel's colleagues, who had a sharp mind and died at a tragically young age. The book also contains some very interesting information about the brain basis of mental illness, including some interesting rodent studies. Also discusses a merging of biological and psychoanalytical thought, plus some recent ideas about consciousness. Overall, a very worthwhile and enjoyable read, for the scientist and general reader alike, delivered with the same thoughtfulness and attention to detail as in his co-authored textbook, Principles of Neural Science. Author of Adjust Your Brain: A Practical Theory for Maximizing Mental Health.

very informative and even entertaining *****

A fabulous book from a distinguished scientist who has spent his career in search of memory. Part memoir, part history of neuroscience, and part pop science account, this is definitely an informative and even an entertaining read. It is filled with colorful characters from the past and present of neuroscience, some famous, some primarily known within their particular field of research. One of these colorful characters was Alden Spencer, who was one of Kandel's colleagues, who had a sharp mind and died at a tragically young age. The book also contains some very interesting information about the brain basis of mental illness, including some interesting rodent studies. Also discusses a merging of biological and psychoanalytical thought, plus some recent ideas about consciousness. Overall, a very worthwhile and enjoyable read, for the scientist and general reader alike, delivered with the same thoughtfulness and attention to detail as in his co-authored textbook, Principles of Neural Science. Author of Adjust Your Brain: A Practical Theory for Maximizing Mental Health.

A pleasure and an education. *****
I thoroughly enjoyed reading this book. The combination of autobiography and science makes it unique. The author acts as an enthusiastic guide to a fascinating area of scientific research. Perhaps there are too many reminiscences about Kandel's colleagues but this adds to the humanity of the story. In no way does it resemble a textbook but this book taught me more about the biology of the brain than any other. I wish I had read it when I was considering university options.

A pleasure and an education. *****

I thoroughly enjoyed reading this book. The combination of autobiography and science makes it unique. The author acts as an enthusiastic guide to a fascinating area of scientific research. Perhaps there are too many reminiscences about Kandel's colleagues but this adds to the humanity of the story. In no way does it resemble a textbook but this book taught me more about the biology of the brain than any other. I wish I had read it when I was considering university options.

In search of the facts ****
I enjoyed this unique blend of biography and science discourse, but found the detail devoted to the personalities and individuals surrounding each new discovery, tedious. There is a good index, and glossary, if you are searching for the essential facts. For someone who is interested in knowing more about neurology and brain science, this is a good book, but a slow building plot! I found there was little said about addictions or the numerous lessons learnt about brain neurology as a result of drug abuse and addiction (LSD is a noteable exception which Kandel does devote some time to). The sections on mental illness will leave physicians a little low on new facts. Interesting historical facts about the Jews in Austria around the time of Hitler.

In search of the facts ****

I enjoyed this unique blend of biography and science discourse, but found the detail devoted to the personalities and individuals surrounding each new discovery, tedious. There is a good index, and glossary, if you are searching for the essential facts. For someone who is interested in knowing more about neurology and brain science, this is a good book, but a slow building plot! I found there was little said about addictions or the numerous lessons learnt about brain neurology as a result of drug abuse and addiction (LSD is a noteable exception which Kandel does devote some time to). The sections on mental illness will leave physicians a little low on new facts. Interesting historical facts about the Jews in Austria around the time of Hitler.