He was playing with a shiny blue remote controlled toy car in his home in Vienna when policemen came to his door and told him and his family that they would have to move out and live with a family they did not know. After being hostage in the new house for sometime, when Eric Kandel came back to his house, it was bare. Everything including his blue car had been taken away.
It is with such kind of memory that Kandel came to the US and escaped World War II. Soon the Nobel laureate made his name for his research on the physiological basis of memory storage in neurons. His book “In Search of memory: The Emergence of a New Science of Mind” is a fascinating account of his life work.
A brief glimpse of it comes when Kandel says, “Leonardo spent a fair time dissecting human cadavers because he wanted to know how the various bones are related to each other and how the muscles are related to the bones. So he wanted to have a realistic understanding of human anatomy for he was depicting real life people, sitting, gesturing, walking and he wanted to get this as absolutely correct as possible. So in order to know how the body functions we need to know something about the anatomy of the body, it is sort of obvious.”
Kandel says, “The more we want to depict the mind, the more it helps to understand the mind and one way to understand the mind is to understand the brain. So it is conceivable that as we get deeper and deeper into the mind we get ideas about how combinations of stimuli affect, for example the emotional states that will allow them to depict the emotional states better.”
In his study into the field of memory, he began by testing a snail. “If you poke it, it withdraws. The response is quick the first two or three times, then it slows down for it feels it is a harmless external stimuli, why should I shrink? We too are made up of memories that dictate how we respond to external stimuli…”
“In addition,” says Kandel, “we are beginning to get in very primitive terms, some insights into the nature of creativity. The left hemisphere is primarily involved in logical processes, calculations, mathematics, rational thinking. The right hemisphere is more involved with musicality. The sing song in my language comes from the right hemisphere and the grammar and articulation from the left. So it was thought the right hemisphere was more important…it synthesises and puts things together, an aspect of creativity.”
The insight comes when Kandel says, “It was felt the two hemispheres inhibit each other. …” Kandel studied people with some brain “defects” and found, “…frontotemporal dementia that affects only the left side show creativity that they have never shown before…”
The talk highlights the need to consider our brains from the physiological, psychological and social contexts in which they operate.
