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In his personal journey, beginning with an interest in Freud's view of the mind, and moving on through his investigations of the biological bases of memory, Eric Kandel tells us he practiced science both night and day. Night science “is a sort of workshop…. Where hypotheses take the form of vague presentiments, of hazy sensations,” Kandel writes, quoting Francois Jacob. Kandel's view of life is consistent with his view of science; that is, one “ultimately has to trust one's unconscious, one's instincts, one's creative urge” (p. 149). One cannot decide on the basis of facts alone.
Eric Kandel is University Professor at Columbia University, Kavli Professor and Director of the Kavli Institute for Brain Sciences, and winner of the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 2000 for neurobiology. The book opens with Kandel playing happily with a shiny blue, remotecontrolled car on his ninth birthday in 1938. Two days later, his family was told to pack and move to a new address. Earlier that year, Hitler had marched into Vienna and Kandel was shunned by all but one of his classmates. By the end of the next month, he had been transferred to a special school for Jews. Because his father had been in the German army in World War I, the family was allowed to leave Austria soon after Kristallnacht. He and his brother boarded a train for Brussels and eventually a ship to New York to live with a relative, his parents' arriving in the United States six months later. Throughout the book, Kandel interweaves personal memories with the biology of memory storage in a style that makes for very stimulating reading.
After completing medical school, Kandel told Harry Grundfest at Columbia that he hoped to learn something about where the ego, the id, and the superego might be located in the brain. From Grundfest he