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There are said to be two Nobel Prize Complexes, and both involve conceit. One of them, exhibited by Sheldon Cooper, the pompous string theorist on TV's leading sitcom, The Big Bang Theory, and also famously by Freud's colleague Tausk (Sperber, 1972), is that one deserves the prize. The second is the conviction that, having won the Nobel Prize in some specific line of endeavor, that one is now equally capable in another field of one's choosing (Highfield, 2012). The latter strains the notion that there is a general intelligence factor, known as g (Jensen, 1908; Spearman, 1904), which has not fared well. Eric Kandel cannot have the first complex, as he has won the prize, but his bridge building in this book from neuroscience into art and culture risks and avoids acquiring the second.
The great biologist Colin Pittendrigh stunned his 1956 freshmen premeds by stating that the terms cytoplasm and nucleoplasm were as much an oversimplification as to say “radioplasm” for the interior of a radio. At the time we students knew about as much about the inside of a cell as we did a fried egg—the center part was a different color. Since then, Kandel and his epigones have pioneered the elucidation of the molecular cascades of cellular memory in a marine snail, opening a nanoworld so intricate it leaves the inner workings of Professor Pittendrigh's radio in the dust. But has our physician hero Kandel strayed beyond his expertise, like the physician pilots who, in their grandiose belief they can handle any conditions, have amassed a terrible crash record?
And who is qualified to judge a book that spans so much? Certainly not this reviewer, a psychoanalytic foot soldier and neuropsychiatric