THE CHEMISTRY OF MEMORY: ERIC KANDEL AND BIOLOGY EXPERIENCE

A boy fled Vienna in 1939 with his brother and a suitcase. Sixty-one years later he stood in Stockholm and accepted the Nobel Prize for work done on a sea slug the size of a slipper, an animal with no face, no expression, and roughly twenty thousand nerve cells, which is about as many as you would find in a bad afternoon of one human cortex. Eric Kandel did not discover memory. He did something cleverer and far more disreputable. He found an animal on which memory was cheap enough to measure, and then spent forty years explaining to serious people why a mollusk was the right place to look for the human soul. This book follows him there. It tells the story of a life pushed out of one city and rebuilt in another, and alongside it the story of an idea that has been hunted for a century and has never once been caught: the memory trace, the engram, the physical thing a memory supposedly is. Karl Lashley cut through brains looking for it and found nothing. Kandel's students found molecules that seemed to be it, until they turned out to be something better and stranger. The argument of this book is that nothing was ever lost, because nothing was ever stored. A memory is not an object kept in a drawer. It is a structure that survives, at cost, against a world in which forgetting is free, and it is remade a little every time it is used. That is why the past feels designed. Only the durable versions are still here to be consulted. >Keywords: memory, neuroscience, Eric Kandel, learning, consciousness, biology, philosophy of mind