You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
At 5:15 a.m. on October 9, 2000, the author of this book received a telephone call from Stockholm informing him that he would share in the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine. It happened to be Yom Kippur and the holy day included a visit to his synagogue. The Nobel citation reads in part, “Eric Kandel's work has shown … how transmitters … create long and short-term memory” (p. 401).
In Search of Memory is the autobiography of a man who was born in Vienna in 1929, but who left the city of his birth at age 9 after its takeover by the Germans. Later in his life, Kandel majored in modern literature and history at Harvard University, and studied medicine at New York University, with the ultimate goal of becoming a psychoanalyst. While he was a psychiatric resident in Boston, undergoing a personal analysis, he decided to become a researcher in neuroscience instead.
Kandel says about his analysis, “It gave me new insights into my own actions and the actions of others and made me, as a result, a somewhat better parent and a more empathic and nuanced human being” (p. 182). He adds, “My initial career as an aspiring psychoanalyst … was the educational bedrock of all I have accomplished since” (p. 426), and “it was clear to me that learning and memory are central to psychoanalysis” (p. 116).
An account of Kandel's own work in this book is preceded by a concise history of neuroscience. He begins with Galvani's discovery of electrical activity in animals in 1791 and goes on to include the discovery of the neuron by Cajal (for which he won the Nobel Prize in 1906); as well, he cites the discovery of the synapse by Sherrington and of action potentials by Adrian (who shared a Nobel prize in 1932), and the discovery of acetylcholine by Dale and Loewi (who won the 1936 Nobel Prize), among others.
By 1957, the work of Brenda Milner with her patient H.M. at the Montreal Neurological Institute had established that new long-term memories were formed in the hippocampus.
Now that the where