A Nobel Prize winner’s search for memory
By: Joan Ruddiman
"In Search of Memory" (Norton, 2006) by Eric Kandel is a fascinating mix of memoir and serious science. Kandel received the Nobel Prize for his contributions to the study of memory storage in the brain. His work for over 40 years with the lowly Aplysia, a sea snail, led to discoveries of how transmitters create short- and long-term memory, forming in the words of the chairman of the board of the Nobel Foundation "the very basis for our ability to exist and interact meaningfully in our world."
Now with his memoir in hand, admirers throughout the world can grasp the delightful irony of Kandel’s achievements. In seeking how the mind grasps memories, he has come to appreciate his own existence and interaction within the world.
Kandel writes in the preface that the impetus for writing his book came in part when, in the fall of 2000, he was invited to write an autobiographical essay as a Noble laureate. What he realized then is that his own memories are so influenced by his life’s work on memory that both stories must be interwoven.
As Kandel explains, "The first is an intellectual history of the extraordinary scientific accomplishments in the study of mind that have taken place in the last fifty years. The second is the story of my life and scientific career over those five decades."
Step by step, over the decades of his life that are consumed with finding the connection of mind and spirit memory Kandel takes his readers through an extraordinary course. He has the ability to make the very complex accessible with lucid narrative and simple diagrams. And he intuitively uses the most effective teaching tool: storytelling. For every minute detail of his work with the simple Aplysia, Kandel weaves in a story of friends, lab partners, his wife Denise, his children, bringing together his rich intellectual and sensory life in and outside the lab.
The effect is challenging and mesmerizing. Just when the science becomes too complex to comprehend, Kandel brings it into focus with a personal anecdote or a simple synthesis of ideas.
The science, though complex, is fascinating, as is Kandel’s experiences with research. Throughout his long career, Kandel was on the cutting edge of the breakthroughs in cognitive biology. It was a rocky road.
As Kandel moved into the field of psychoanalysis in the early 1950s, he entered an intellectual world in flux that was slowly moving from a Freudian perspective to a biological understanding of behavior. When Kandel made "the most difficult career decision of my life" in leaving the practice of psychiatry for full-time research, his colleagues and teachers with whom he had studied psychoanalysis could not fathom how he could "reject" this field to study brain science. The prevailing understanding was that the mind and body were separate. He notes that five decades later, "the idea that the human mind and spirituality originate in a physical organ, the brain, is new and startling for some people."
Even more intriguing for most readers is the story of Kandel’s life, which is colored by his family’s displacement from their home at the hands of the Nazis. Kandel begins his story in Vienna with a memory from his ninth birthday, which becomes a watershed moment in his memory as the family’s lives were interrupted and forever influenced. Though his parents would have been aware of impending dangers of the Nazi programs against Jews, their youngest son was well insulated from the ugly politics in a stimulating and nurturing home in the intellectually and artistically rich city of Vienna. Two days after that very happy birthday, Nazi police invaded their apartment.
For Kandel, the memory of the joy of receiving a blue toy car for his birthday is significant, but ever the scientist, so is the wonder of having a memory and the ability to relive in detail a place and time from 67 years before. Science enhances the event; story illuminates the science.
The Kandel family was fortunate that their losses were material furs, jewelry, silver as well as the little blue car. Within a year, Eric and his 14-year-old brother Ludwig were sent to live with their grandparents in New York. Their parents joined them six months later.
This "defining period of my life," as he writes in the first chapter, indeed shaped his life course. Kandel entered Harvard with "an insatiable interest in contemporary Austrian and German history" in order to understand "the political and cultural context in which those calamitous events occurred." As he pondered motivation and human behaviors "how a people who loved art and music at one moment could in the very next moment commit the most barbaric and cruel acts" he discovered psychoanalysis, "a discipline focused on peeling back the layers of personal memory and experience to understand the often irrational roots of human motivation, thoughts and behavior."
Then he entered the world of research, which, as he writes at the end of his memoir, has been his great joy. From seeking answers to huge existential questions, to seeking to understand the complexity of the brain, Kandel moved to ever-smaller circles until he ultimately was seeking answers from the action of one cell.
Against others’ judgment, Kandel believed that the lowly snail was not radically different from complex mammals. Again, Kandel was ahead of the curve. Early on, he had turned away from studying the hippocampus in the mammalian brain "to studying simple forms of learning in the sea snail."
Over the years, his work and others support that all nerve cells and how they function are similar. He notes, "The regulatory protein CREB, first identified in Aplysia, was found to be an important component in the switch from short to long-term memory in many forms of learning in various types of organism, from snails, to flies to mice to people."
In the latter chapters, Kandel’s two stories merge as he shares how the Nobel Prize brought him back to his Vienna roots. For most of his life, he did not speak of the Holocaust and its impact. Then when Thomas Klestil, the president of Austria, called Kandel to congratulate him on the award, Kandel got the idea to hold a symposium he titled, "Austria’s Response to National Socialism: Implications for Scientific and Humanistic Scholarship," which was held in Vienna in 2003. His objective was to "compare Austria’s response to the Hitler period, which was one of denial of any wrongdoing, with Germany’s response, which was to try to deal honestly with the past."
Ah, memories. Kandel is painfully aware of how the Nazi propagandistic messages from 70 years ago that vilified the Jews live on today in anti-Semitic thinking, even in light of decades of evidence to the contrary. Kandel now actively works to illuminate the truth.
The scientist is a social scholar, is a psychiatrist, is a son of Jews, is the father of Jewish daughters. The beauty of the man, his book, his life’s work is that he does not separate one life from another, one field of study from another, does not separate his mind from his spirit.
"In Search of Memory: The Emergence of a New Science of the Mind" challenges the reader on many levels, but it is a memorable reading experience.
Joan Ruddiman, Ed. D., is a teacher and friend of the Allentown Public Library.

