Kandel received a Nobel Prize for his research on the brain. His book is in part an intellectual autobiography beginning with his life in Vienna and subsequent emigration to the US after the Nazi Anschluss; but mostly he describes his researches on the learning and memory processes of snails, mice, and other creatures. Impressive in its detail of not only his experiments, but those of many other scientists when they overlapped his. His writing is engaging in spite of the detail of the nervous system and brain that he describes, and he shows how science is done in collaboration with others and how his research was influenced by others. Terrific introduction in the historical development of neuroscience in the second half of the 20th century, to which Kandel was a major contributor, and to how the brain functions.

My journey with this book has been long, spans three libraries in three different countries, the ebook and the audiobook. From being recommended it in 2017/2018, picking it up in 2019, returning then picking it up, then returning and picking it up, then reading the ebook, then the audiobook to finish it off. It has been with me through the pandemic, it has been with me in my first internship, it has been with me as I lamented choosing a career different from neuroscience and as I now finish it with a career shift closer to the book than ever. I consider this a milestone and I'm grateful again for the audiobook for helping me finish it and making it more enjoyable and accessible.

And funny how hearing some of the names mentioned that I've actually one way or another been introduced to throughout my career.

It's been a companion.

This is an improbable book by an improbable man. Eric Kandel fled Vienna with his parents and brother when he was nine, just as the Nazis were moving in. The family settled in New York where Eric excelled in school and then went to Harvard to be...an intellectual historian...no, a psychoanalyst...no, a Nobel-prize winning brain scientist.

Here, he weaves elements of his personal autobiography together with elements of his scientific biography. There are many ways to get at the science he presents, but this is a good one, starting with work at the cellular level on learning and moving toward memory and the role of genes in the multiple components of the brain. For a nonscientist this book can be demanding but also astonishing. Kandel's story takes us several important steps toward understanding the interaction of organic features of human life with environmental features (nature v nurture). We end up with no "ghost in the machine" but a mysterious ability to take experience and record it at the molecular level, where memories are stored.

Kandel's life really is his fascination with science, his attachment to his wife, and his generosity toward his scientific colleagues. Once he is clear of Vienna, he has the freedom to explore, examine and verify the underpinnings of what he calls "mind," not "the mind." Along the way he helps elevate biology, previously a descriptive science, to the analytic/synthetic heights of chemistry and physics. This exposition reminds us of our capabilities as human beings while at the same time illustrating the ways in which science outstrips social reality. The things we can do scientifically simply dwarf our abilities to fashion just, liberal societies.

Kandel continues to believe that Freud, originally a neurologist, remains relevant, particularly in the dimensions of understanding the conscious, the pre-conscious, and the unconscious. He frequently cites Freud's speculations about how much more his generation had to learn about the brain and how future generations undoubtedly would advance new paradigms for understanding it. The ultimate problem, of course, is subjectivity: why do certain experiences evoke different reactions in different individuals, all of whom really do see pretty much the same blue and hear pretty much the same note C.

Kandel often mentions his love of music, but he doesn't reach the obvious conclusion: the role of the artist is to fashion a compelling aesthetic subjectivity to which the multitude can have access. Art is the deepest exploration of mind we know. That's why it is so hard to produce.

The first several and the last several chapters were the parts I found interesting. The detailed anaylsis of every single neuron (or so it seemed) in the marine snail Aplyasia, not so interesting. I learned a bit about the history of the Nobel Prize and what it's like to win one, but most of the time it felt more like this was Eric Kandel's lab notebook that I was reading. I like that I finally finished the book, if that's any indication!

I read this for a brain science and pedagogy. It was a wealth of information on the brain. Absolutely fascinating, yet had to reread some sections because it was hard for me to comprehend. The best part is how he intertwined his life story into his studies of the brain. Fascinating!

Kandel creates a tangible link between “speculative metaphysics” (9) and experimental research. At once, this is a story of Kandel’s self and a story of creating and finding the space where the conceptual self can take shape. Kandel weaves his personal history into the history of biological inquiry into the nature of the mind. His method is ambitious, but, as an initially skeptical reader, I ultimately found it deeply meaningful. Through unifying philosophical, physiological, and his personal conceptions of the mind, Kandel leads us to consider that, perhaps, the space between these divergent ideas is the space in which we can find the utmost clarity on a range of fundamental metaphysical questions.

Kandel ends his story through expressing gratitude for the fact that he had the privilege to explore these questions throughout his life and career. His words are humble but self-aware, at once light-hearted and blunt regarding the uglier parts of his personal history. I finished Kandel’s book grateful to have become acquainted with the honest, bright human voice behind such grand ideas.

Kandel’s writing is clear and engaging as he invites the reader not only into his own life but also into the neurobiological developments of the last 50 years. His story is incredibly interesting and down to earth as he describes an accomplished scientific community as his friends and colleagues. It will leave you feeling connected and inspired in the research that has been done and will continue to be done.

The natural sciences, abetted by technologies they themselves have made possible, have become increasingly difficult for lay people to understand. There are even a few twentieth century idioms that express this gulf: when we want to say something isn't particularly hard, we can say "well, it's not rocket science" or "well, it's not brain surgery."

If we're going to ascend the heights of domains like astrophysics or neuroscience, then, those of us not fortunate enough to have studied the fields need excellent sherpas in such rarefied air. Many years ago, I read Brian Greene's The Elegant Universe, and while I wouldn't pretend to understand it (or String Theory) with any kind of refinement, I did feel like I had gotten a whole education in relativity and quantum mechanics just from the wealth of background material Greene provided. Here, Nobel laureate Eric Kandel does the same thing for the neurobiology of memory, except with even greater clarity and sense of narrative.

The book is partially a memoir, which could easily make for heavy going, but it doesn't here: Kandel, an Austrian Jew, was a refugee from the Anschluss and his early years are intrinsically interesting. After accounting for his early years, Kandel quickly delves into his education and early interest in psychology and, later, neuroscience.

He doesn't stop at himself, though, and this is what makes the book such a perfect, magisterial introduction: to elucidate the (often very narrow) problems of simple learning that he studied during his career, Kandel offers an account of the development of modern neuroscience by following the conjectures, questions, frustrations, and insights of scientists (and even philosophers) as they occurred. So we go all the way back to Galvani's discovery that electrical impulses could move muscle fibers; we learn how Franz Joseph Gall was expelled from Austria for hypothesizing that the mind and brain are not separate; we follow the young Freud as he conjectures that the subconscious could be biologically rooted, and Santiago Ramón y Cajal as he verifies and documents those biological roots, showing how neurons connect to one another across synaptic clefts. Instead of simply describing the action of neurotransmitters and the interplay of chemical and electrical signals in the brain, Kandel dramatizes the "soup vs spark" debate that raged midcentury, explaining the evidence that led scientists in different directions and showing how, when the argument was decided largely in favor of "soup," some fine scientists on the losing side went on to do excellent research on brain chemistry.

This rooting of a large, complex mass of information in a historical, narrative form makes In Search of Memory feel exciting: difficult and informative as it is, reading it never feels like merely eating one's vegetables. Kandel is just as clear when describing his own work, and although his discoveries of physical mechanisms for storing memories are breathtaking, he treats them with great humility. Unlike so many popular summaries of scientific work, Kandel refuses to draw conclusions beyond what the evidence actually warrants. Any speculation (e.g., does what works for a sea snail work for more complex organisms, like mice or cats or human beings?) is subjected to the most rigorous experimentation. So this book functions not just as a fine historical introduction to neuroscience, nor solely as an account of one scientists's career, but also as a masterclass in the scientific method at its best. If our culture of public debate acquired one tenth of Eric Kandel's circumspection and rigor, we would find ourselves in an improved, and unrecognizable, world.

In 2017, it bears noting that the memoiristic sections of In Search of Memory contain some chilling and highly relevant details. At a dinner he attended in Austria some years after winning the Nobel, Kandel is accosted by an Austrian woman who, quite without remorse or self-awareness, tries to explain away the Kristallnacht and Austria's collaboration in the Holocaust by appealing to economic insecurity and fear that Jews unfairly dominated academic and media jobs. In another place, Kandel documents how his early mentor Harry Grundfest lost funding and suffered serious career setbacks because of McCarthyist suspicions (which proved unfounded). Kandel is optimistic about his adoptive country, but many of these patterns of thought remain with us far more than they ought to. The book is a timely warning.

Near the end, Kandel diversifies his scope considerably, taking us on brief tours of the hard problem of consciousness, the emerging collaboration of neuroscientists with pharmacologists and cognitive psychologists, and new directions of research into the treatment of refractory brain diseases. He shows enormous erudition here, and even further afield, when he ruminates on Austrian modernist art or the operas of Wagner.

In short, Eric Kandel is a towering intellect and, much rarer, one who can lead the general public up into the Himalayan air that he breathes with native ease. The journey is long, but if you take it, it will merely feel like it is over too soon. Highly recommended.

An autobiography rather than detailing the neuroscience of the mind. I don't want to give it a rating cause it's not bad it's just not what I wanted.

As he walks you through history of discovery and development of whole field, everything becomes clear and you gain the insight in workings of your own mind. I can highly recommend this one - both as place to start reading about subject as well as for someone already invested in the field.

An interesting autobiography from a Nobel Prize winner who has spent a lifetime exploring and documenting how the brain works and how it relates to our inner self.

It is also a documentary of the vicious antisemitism of the Austrians, which continues to this day.

This is a superb study of the science of mind as well as a superb study of Kandel as a human being. It traces his progress from a child escaping the Holocaust to his Nobel Prize in medicine and physiology, and beyond. Starting out in psychiatry, he switched to being a research scientist who followed his own intuitions, rather than professional advice, to slowly unfold the secrets of how memories are formed in the neural system, first in a sea snail, then in mice, finally in humans. Though the progress toward a "theory of mind" still has miles to go, his part in its development today is fascinating.

This is probably the clearest outline of scientific research that I've ever read, but it goes well beyond that, because it is interwoven with the personal progress of a remarkable human being. His telling personal details—especially the horrifying complicity of the Austrian population in the Holocaust and the country's inability and disinterest in dealing with that shame—give special weight to his life story. Yet the most winning aspect to his writing is the balance he brings to all these details and his apparent inability to attach blame to even the most intolerant. He attempts to share all credit at every level for what he's accomplished and appears not to have a jealous or condescending molecule to his makeup.

If your bent is toward biological science and the unraveling of mental processes—especially the intermediate ground that is neither pop science nor numerical overload—I can't imagine a better book. If there were a Nobel for human decency in science, Kandel would deserve it.