In Search of Memory: The Emergence of a New Science of Mind (review)

In Search of Memory will join James Watson's The Double Helix and Santiago Ramón y Cajal's Recollections of My Life as one of the most readable scientific life stories. Superbly written, Eric Kandel's narrative "interweaves" his own emergence as a scientist with the development of contemporary neuroscience (p. xv). It is simultaneously a moving autobiography, a lucid introduction to neuroscience, and a persuasive argument that mind is inseparable from brain.

As Kandel describes his quest to understand consciousness through history, medicine, psychoanalysis, and molecular neurobiology, he demonstrates the interdependence of science, politics, and personal life. His search for memory begins with his family's flight from Nazi-occupied Austria and ends with his demand that the Austrians acknowledge their role in expelling and murdering Jews. Although he presents his motivation as scientific curiosity, he frames his search with episodes illustrating what we must never forget.

In Search of Memory celebrates science, especially American science, as a free, egalitarian realm in which anything can happen. He presents it as a group activity that proceeds through collaborations in an international community. In his narrative, some fields develop in the most exciting ways when they merge with others perceived as different but trying to answer similar questions. Other disciplines, such as psychoanalysis, stagnate when they refuse to acknowledge their affinities to different ways of studying human thought. While Kandel says disappointingly little about the day-to-day practice of science, he offers a highly informative overview of the way that sciences of mind have developed throughout the twentieth century.

For those starting careers in science, Kandel has invaluable wisdom. Describing his decision to leave mammalian brains and use the marine snail Aplysia as a model system, he writes that he had learned from marriage "to trust one's instincts, one's unconscious, one's creative urge" (p. 149). When his long hours in the laboratory threatened his marriage, he learned that "hard thinking . . . is much more valuable than simply running more experiments" (p. 162). In his final advice to young scientists, he writes that it is better to "lose some years trying something new" than to do the same experiments everyone else is doing (p. 427). The entire story of his scientific life conveys the benefits of taking risks.

Kandel has not written a history of neuroscience, and his picture of science past distorts the record somewhat by focusing on a few great individuals rather than on complex collaborations. No one would quarrel with his choices of Hermann Helmholtz and Santiago Ramón y Cajal, but Emil du Bois-Reymond's electrophysiology and Wilhelm His's neuroembryology should be mentioned in conjunction with those scientists' work.

For the most part, Kandel succeeds in combining his personal and scientific narratives. His life story provides the driving force in the opening and conclusion but languishes in the middle, when the book becomes an introduction to the science of mind. If anything, the story flows too smoothly. It is hard to believe that any scientist's life could have been so untroubled, and one wishes that Kandel had described the dead ends, the waste, the feuds, and the frustrations so that readers could learn from them as well as from his successes. Overall, however, his story strikes the reader as optimistic, not censored. He has experienced science as exhilarating, and that is what he wants to convey. In an era in which science has received more than its share of criticism, he shows us that there really is such a thing as progress. While reminding readers not to forget the past, In Search of Memory urges us to consider what neuroscience may achieve in this century.