In Search of Memory

"The locus of memory was, and is, a major problem for clinical neuroscience. By 1958 Penfield conceded his mistake of equating the ‘memory cortex’ with certain parts of the temporal cortex which he came to regard as the ‘interpretative cortex.’ And the search for memory is the overarching theme of Eric Kandel’s memoir. In stark contrast to playing baseball at Yale (Cushing) and football at Princeton (Penfield), in the aftermath of Kristallnacht in 1939 10-year-old Kandel and his family fled their home in Vienna, the nexus of art & science which vanished in the conflagration of WWII. Kandel did later attend Harvard and, perhaps with a view to exorcise the demons of his childhood home, studied European intellectual history with an interest in how “fine” German minds succumbed to National Socialism. “We’re still a long way from finding the neuroscience Holy Grail that unlocks the ‘hard problem’ of consciousness” Upon meeting two members of Freud’s circle, his interests underwent a sea-change and he resolved to attend medical school and become a psychoanalyst…but with a radically different approach to the Freudian icons of ego, superego, and id. On elective in the neurophysiology laboratory of Harry Grundfest, Kandel put forth his wild surmises as to “where in the elaborate folds of the human brain … [Freud’s] psychic agencies might live.” Grundfest “told me, to understand the mind we needed to look at the brain one cell at a time.” Alea jacta est. Kandel set out to prove that mental experiences change the structure of the brain. He chose to study the 20,000 neurons comprising the nervous system of the foot-long marine snail Aplysia californica on an informed (and inspired) hunch without a preliminary dissection of the creature. Its large synaptic potentials eventually enabled him to work out for the first time the precise wiring diagram of a behavior, and that “by producing profound structural changes, learning can make inactive synapses active or active synapses inactive.” In keeping with the synaptic leitmotif running through 20th-century neuroscience, Kandel established that short-term memory transiently strengthens pre-existing synaptic connections and long-term memory alters gene expression & protein synthesis and grows new and stronger synapses. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter After graduating from medical school, Kandel completed a medical internship, pursued neurophysiology for three years at the National Institutes for Health, and then returned to Harvard for a residency in psychiatry. Subsequently Kandel, in a state of psychoanalytic apostasy, struggled mightily to persuade his psychoanalytic colleagues of the linkage of mind and brain. After outlining his plans of studying learning in Aplysia a distinguished psychiatrist muttered, “It sounds to me as if your psychoanalysis was not fully successful; you seem never really to have quite resolved your transference.” These carping Freudian ex cathedra criticisms were the regrettable norm for a specialty that “treated the brain as a black box” and thankfully did not deter Kandel. In fairness to his psychoanalytic colleagues, the idea of studying the human mind via invertebrates was pretty radical at that time. Psychoanalytic training may have left its mark, but Kandel’s studies of the simplest of neural circuits underscored his belief that “given the importance of unconscious psychic processes, it is reassuring to think that biology can now teach us a good bit about them.”"