In Search of Memory: The Emergence of a New Science of Mind by eric r. kandel

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

April 17,2025

Kandel has created a narrative that fuses his own scientific development and interests with the broader historical and landmark developments in neuroscience. He gradually focuses in on his own expanding research to present his own findings on memory and learning along with other related work. I found the book incredibly clearly written and his explanation of tricky scientific ideas very approachable.
The autobiographical sections can be a bit unexciting but his interests in art and psychoanalysis contribute for an interesting tour of ideas. It was particularly interesting to see that in his thinking about the workings of the mind he considers ideas from a very broad spectrum - from nonempirical psychoanalytic thought to genetics.

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DDiez15

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

April 17,2025

This is an excellent autobiography and history of brain science. The author has a nice way about him, humble and grateful and I most enjoyed the stories that accompanied his science research and career path. The science history is all good, however, as a laymen, I found some of the science too technical and glossed over it. There is a nice glossary in the back, so that is useful.

The takeaway for me was that brain science and science in general is constantly evolving and changing. The fact that psychoanalysis has merged with cellular biology and neuroscience is quite fascinating. The author recounted his life story from his childhood in Vienna to his education in Brooklyn, to Harvard, and his studies from medical school to research labs, and his foray into biotech and pharma. He is a Nobel laureate and won the prize in 2000. Throughout the book there is an undercurrent and concern with anti-Semitism, particularly that of Austria, the author's birth country.

Lots of discussion about lab studies and experiments in the Aplysia snail, rats, mice, etc. The story is very well written. If you want to understand brain science, even a little, you will enjoy the read but be prepared to take notes and to spend some time as the book is 430 pages excluding the glossary and endnotes.

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Jdstaff

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

April 17,2025

The section on consciousness was particularly interesting.

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paperstarxo

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

April 17,2025

We read this for a neuroscience book club I co-run. Comment if you want our notes :)

I'm continually impressed by Kandel's scientific output, both academically, and in his popular science books. Age of Insight and Reductionism in Art and Brain science influenced me a lot as an artist, as well as in my science. Principles of Neural Science was a major reference text for me in grad school. One funny thing about this book was that it read like a retrospective on a career now coming to an end, which makes sense because he was 77 when he wrote it, but then he went on to write FIVE more books. He has accomplished several lifetimes worth of work, and somehow remained a chill guy. You get the feeling he'd never come off as rushed if you had a conversation with him.

This was a pretty interesting and accessible book. I enjoyed learning so much about Kandel's early life. The content was very personal and introspective. I was amazed to learn that his family lived under Nazi rule for a year, a terrifying period when his father was "disappeared" for a time, before managing to escape, separately, to New York.

His scientific journey from psychoanalysis to biological neuroscience was really interesting and relatable. He makes it a point to highlight the people who influenced him, and how. I loved hearing about the vibrancy of his social circles. I a-little-bit got chills when he talked about having the insight that they could study three main forms of learning (habituation, sensitization, and classical conditioning) biologically by translating them into patterns of electrical impulses applied directly to aplysia.

I loved reading about their quest to find out how learning was restricted to individual synapses and was blown away to learn about the prion-like proteins that live at our synapses to regulate local protein synthesis for memory storage. The process of him getting the Nobel Prize was pretty interesting too.

Sick burn when the Austrian president called him and was like "congrats to a fellow Austrian" and Kandel is like NOPE, not an Austrian, you guys literally jumped at the chance to get Jews out of here because you loved Hitler so much. And Austria is like, no we were just victims of Hitler's aggression. Kandel is like, oh that's interesting because Austrians made up 8% of the population under the Greater German Reich, but made up 30% of the officials working to eliminate the Jews.

What was up with that Mitzi story?? Did anyone else think it was weird that his first sexual encounter happened when he was 8? Why was Mitzi so into an 8 year old??

Anyway, it was a well put-together book. I would have rated it higher if I was really into biographies, but it's just not a genre I'm typically super into, and at some points, I was getting a bit bored with all the names and biographical details. Generally though, good book, and Kandel is one of the most amazing people I've ever read about.

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RaikoTheSaikou

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

April 17,2025

Naprosto úžasná knížka, ve které Eric nejprve popisuje funkci neuronů a nervové soustavy a postupně přechází ke svému výzkumu paměti na úrovni neuronů, za který byl oceněn Nobelovo cenou. Celá kniha je velmi pochopitlně vysvětlena i pro ajťáka, který se k danému tématu přiblížil naposledy v přírodopise na základní škole. Odborné části jsou proloženy autobiografickými úseky, ve kterých autor popisuje svůj osobní život, motivací k výzkumu i ukazuje jeho mindset, který vedl k jeho úspěchům.

Jelikož se věnuji tématu umělých neuronových sítí (machine learning), bylo pro mě neskutečně zajímavé je porovnávat s biologickými a zkoumat jejich podobnosti a odlišnosti v počtech, funkci, způsobech propojení, nebo ve způsobech učení.

V úvodních kapitolách se autor vysvětluje základní fuknce neuronů, jejich typy, detailně popisuje způsob šíření signálu přes neuron pomocí akčního potenciálu, způsobem přenosu signálu mezi buňkami přes synapse pomocí neurotrasmiterů, to vše i s biologickými a chemickými principy, které toto úmožňují.

V další části knihy autor vysvěltuje jakým způsobem na úrovni jednotlivých neuronů replikoval výsledky Pavlovových experimentů (habituaace, sensitizace, classical conditioning) a to v rámci paměti krátkodobé (pomocí neurotrasmiterů serotonin, dopamin) i dlouhodobé (pomocí růstu nových synapsí způsobených aktivací různých genů a dalšími biologickými procesy).

Dále se autor v knize zmiňuje o různých částech mozku, jako somatosenzorickém cortexu, který zprocovává informaci o dotyku, vizuálním cortexu, který zpracovává vizuální informaci, nebo o Broca's/Wernicke's areas které zajišťuji syntézu/pochopení jazyka.

Knížka byla zároveň velmi pochopitelně psaná pro laika i vysvěltlila problematiku i do detailů a určitě bych ji doporučil každému kdo se chce o nervové soustavě a mozku dozvědět více.

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SSDkoChan

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

April 17,2025

This book is both inspiring and illuminating. Eric Kandel elegantly intertwines his life story with the progress in brain research. He touches on so many areas, from psychoanalysis, psychology, and behavior to molecular/cellular biology and nerve signaling.

In this book, I learned:
1. the autobiography of Eric Kandel (which I found thrilling and full of surprising facts)
2. a large part of the history of neuroscience
3. the neural mechanisms of long and short memory work in Aplysia and how it translates to other invertebrate and also vertebrate.
4. molecular/cellular biology and how it helps to decipher the neural circuitry of high cognitive functions e.g. memory
5. the usefulness of the reductionist method to solve complex questions, like for instance memory and mental illnesses.

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pornocop

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

April 17,2025

for class

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JadenSmiles

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

April 17,2025

Kandel in his autobiography gives not only an elegant and thoughtful account of his Nobel-prize winning research career but beautifully explains memory and all of the researchers who have pushed that frontier alongside Kandel. He begins with the cultural anti-semitism (along with ‘radical’) that is prevalent in Vienna before he is forced to emigrate to the United States to escape. This anti-semitism is a source of angst for Kandel as he laments over the death of an intellectual haven that was Vienna. Regardless, he moves on and combines through a series of fortunate experiences he has at the NIMH and others with a love for psychiatry and Freudian thinking. One of the things I was looking for was the fact that he had initially no idea what he wanted to work on but eventually did come up with a question that he found passionate enough to explore. And in this he took a leap of faith and moved to Paris to work on the Aplysia which really brought him insecurities and a feeling that while “one cannot decide on cold facts because facts are often insufficient, one ultimately has to trust one’s unconscious, one’s instinct and one’s creative urge.” Eventually he went on to show through an elegant dissection of a primitive Aplysia reflex the molecular basis of conditional learning and eventually went on to show the underlying molecular mechanisms of long term memory.

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

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