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This intimidating tome, clad in a beautiful cover based on a painting by Gustav Klimt, is gripping from the first paragraph on. The comprehensive historical and scientific research information assembled by Kandel, though quite accessible to laypersons, is so voluminous that for this reader it has been impossible to take away from each chapter more than general salient ideas.
The picture of Eric Kandel in this book is, indeed, that of a polymath, a 21st century “Renaissance man.” At the same time, according to the Acknowledgments (pp. 510-515), he is willing to turn to a number of experts, colleagues, and friends for guidance. What distinguishes this author is not only his sophistication in such varied interests as neuroscience, art, and psychoanalysis, but particularly his vast integrative power. Beyond that, he strives for a synthesis of sorts. He looks to the future via the past, repeating moves from philosophy to science, and reviewing, for example, recent writings of E. O. Wilson and others. He speaks of “parent disciplines” incorporating “anti-disciplines,” a reprocessing to “unify knowledge” as in the “merger of cognitive psychology, the science of mind and neural science, the science of the brain [thereby giving] rise to a new science of mind” (p. 505). He concludes that: “[A] new dialogue between the natural sciences and the humanities and social sciences … could help us understand better the mechanisms in the brain that make creativity possible, whether in art, the sciences, or the humanities and open up a new dimension in intellectual history” (p. 509).
While this text overtly treats science and art and psychoanalysis, a subtext emerges. It is Kandel's effort to integrate the many significant personal, familial, and professional events in his now long life into a synthesis of the man, the Nobel Prize winner of 2000, he has become.
In the preface to The Age of Insight, Kandel describes such social and professional interactions among artists, physicians, writer