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“A stunning book.”—Oliver Sacks Memory binds our mental life together. We are who we are in large part because of what we learn and remember. But how does the brain create memories? Nobel Prize winner Eric R. Kandel intertwines the intellectual history of the powerful new science of the mind—a combination of cognitive psychology, neuroscience, and molecular biology—with his own personal quest to understand memory. A deft mixture of memoir and history, modern biology and behavior, In Search of Memory brings readers from Kandels childhood in Nazioccupied Vienna to the forefront of one of the great scientific endeavors of the twentieth century: the search for the biological basis of memory.
[...]... prove that he had been a soldier in the Austro-Hungarian army, fighting on the side of Germany during World War I The memories of those days—steering my car around the apartment with increasing assurance, hearing the bangs on the door, being ordered by the Nazi policemen to go to a stranger’s apartment, finding ourselves robbed of our belongings, the disappearance and reappearance of my father—are the. .. hunter after World War II, was later to say that “compared to Vienna, the Kristallnacht in Berlin was a pleasant Christmas festival.” On the day of Kristallnacht, as my father was rounded up, his store was taken away from him and turned over to a non-Jew This was part of the so-called Aryanization (Arisierung) of property, a purportedly legal form of theft From the time of my father’s release from prison... country in Europe, surpassed in area only by Russia The empire extended in the northeast to what is now Ukraine, its eastern provinces included what are now the Czech and Slovak republics, and its southern provinces contained Hungary, Croatia, and Bosnia After the war, Austria was drastically reduced in size, having lost all of its foreignspeaking provinces and retaining only the German-speaking core... of the apartment where I steered my toy car woven into my brain’s internal representation of the spatial world around me? How did terror sear the banging on the door of our apartment into the molecular and cellular fabric of my brain with such permanence that I can relive the experience in vivid visual and emotional detail more than a half century later? These questions, unanswerable a generation ago,... was the other) in our class of about 1,150 to be admitted to Harvard, both of us with scholarships After receiving the scholarships, Ron and I appreciated the true meaning of Harvard’s alma mater, “Fair Harvard.” Fair Harvard, indeed! 3–1 The winning team at the Pennsylvania Relays, 1948 The Pennsylvania Relays is an annual national event for high school and college track athletes We won one of the. .. cognitive neuroscience received an enormous boost from brain imaging, a technology that enabled brain scientists to realize their dream of peering inside the human brain and watching the activity in various regions as people engage in higher mental functions—perceiving a visual image, thinking about a spatial route, or initiating a voluntary action Brain imaging works by measuring indices of neural activity:... beginning in the 1920s, the agenda of the Nazi party, which was framed in part by Austrian Nazis, included the merger of all German-speaking people into a Greater Germany In the fall of 1936 Hitler began to act on this agenda In full control of Germany since 1933, he had reinstated conscription in 1935, and the next year he had ordered his troops to reoccupy the Rhineland, a German-speaking region that... Viennese acquired culture not as an ornament of life, or a badge of status, but as the air they breathed,” wrote Carl Schorske, the cultural historian of Vienna Karl Kraus, the great satirical social and literary critic, said of Vienna that “its streets are not paved with asphalt but with culture.” In addition to being culturally vibrant, Vienna was also alive sensually My fondest early memories are typically... had seen something of untrammeled human insights of horror or panic I had taken part in a dozen battles in the First World War, had experienced barrages, gassings, going over the top I had witnessed the turmoil of the postwar era, the crushing uprisings, street battles, meeting hall brawls I was present among the bystanders during the Hitler Putsch in 1923 in Munich I saw the early period of Nazi rule... autobiographical essay In the course of writing mine, I saw more clearly than before how my interest in the nature of memory was rooted in my childhood experiences in Vienna I also saw more vividly, and with great wonder and gratitude, that my research has allowed me to participate in a historic period of science and to be part of an extraordinary international community of biological scientists In the . army, fighting on the side of Germany during World War I. The memories of those days—steering my car around the apartment with increasing assurance, hearing the bangs on the door, being ordered. laureates are invited to write an autobiographical essay. In the course of writing mine, I saw more clearly than before how my interest in the nature of memory was rooted in my childhood experiences. experiences in Vienna. I also saw more vividly, and with great wonder and gratitude, that my research has allowed me to participate in a historic period of science and to be part of an extraordinary international