Recommended Books
from Eric Kandel

Book List Remembrance of Things Past Marcel Proust "Funes the Memorist" in Ficciones Jorge Luis Borges Memories Are Made of This Rusiko Bourtchouladze Memory and Brain Larry Squire The Seven Sins of Memory: How the Mind Forgets and Remembers Dan Schacter

Background Eric R. Kandel has won a Lasker Award (1983) and a Nobel Prize (2000) for his work on cellular mechanisms of learning. In his 2006 book, In Search of Memory: The Emergence of a New Science of Mind, he writes about his scientific work on memory, as well as his own memories, which go back to pre-war Vienna. Kandel continues his research in his lab at Columbia University in New York City. Essay Memory is the glue—the cohesive force—that holds together the various aspects of our mental life. Because of its seminal importance, there are many excellent discussions of the various facets of memory. I here select a small set of personal favorites. These fall into two categories: Literary Analyses and Scientific Analyses. Literary Analyses of Memory Memory is the scaffold that holds our mental life together, so that we are who we are in large part because of what we learn and what we remember. One of the most remarkable characteristics of memory is that it has no restraints on time and place. It allows us to undergo mental time travel. It allows you to sit in the living room of your home and have your mind wander back to your childhood and to recall the special event that pleased or pained you. The ability to allow our sensory experience to open the floodgates of memory is central to much great fiction and is described in most detail in Marcel Proust's one-million-word classic Remembrance of Things Past. In Proust's time travel, dipping a Madeleine into his tea opens for the protagonist the floodgates of his early memories and allows him to recall his childhood experiences in vivid and lengthy detail. Less detailed remembrances are found in other writers of fiction. One of the most fascinating descriptions is Borges' short story, Funes the Memorist (in the volume titled Ficciones). Borges, the great Argentinian novelist, shared the Prix Formentor in 1961 with Samuel Beckett for his stories about human freedom. Sensing himself going blind, Borges realizes the central and sometimes paradoxical role of memory in human existence. His short story, remarkable for its brevity, clarity, and surprise, describes Funes, a young man who had sustained a modest head injury after falling off a horse and, as a result, cannot forget anything he has ever experienced. He can learn and retain the structure of new languages and remember every experience waking and dreaming. This extraordinary ability to remember is important from the perspective of the function of memory storage. We know from everyday life that having an excessively weak memory is a handicap. Borges illustrates that having too much memory capability is also a handicap and that the capacity to forget is a blessing. Too strong a memory can, as in Funes's case, also be a curse. Funes's memories are of details, not of universal principles. He cannot be creative. His head feels to him as if it is filled with garbage! Scientific Analyses of Memory There are several very good introductions to the biology of memory storage for the general reader. I particularly like Rusiko Bourtchouladze's Memories Are Made of This. Bourtchouladze is a gifted writer who is also a behaviorist, originally trained in the former Soviet Union in institutes stimulated by the research of Ivan Pavlov, the discoverer of classical conditioning. After a career in British and American laboratories, Bourtchouladze now serves as vice president of Psychogenics, a biotechnology company. In her own research, she has carried out important studies on behavior in genetically modified mice. In this book, Bourtchouladze discusses both great themes of memory storage—the areas of the brain recruited for different forms of memory, and the molecular problem of memory storage—the molecular mechanisms whereby memory is stored at each site. In considering the system problems of memory, Bourtchouladze describes the now famous patient H.M. studied by the great Canadian psychologist Brenda Milner. In a classic analysis carried out over two decades in which she examined H.M. on a regular basis, Milner, professor at McGill and a giant of 20th century neuropsychology, succeeded in localizing a component of memory storage in the medial temporal lobe. Unlike Funes, where being knocked down gave him greater memory, H.M.'s more serious brain trauma and ultimate surgery gave him a devastating memory loss: H.M. could not store any new information about people, places, and objects. Larry Squire's Memory and Brain is a classic in the biology of memory. Squire, a professor of psychiatry and neuroscience and the University of California at San Diego, and himself a major contributor to the biology of memory, provides a superb historical overview of the key experiments and insights that have given rise to our current understanding of the systems problem of memory storage, particularly what is the nature of the information stored and what systems in the brain store that information. Squire pioneered the modern biological study of memory as a multiprocess storage mechanism by delineating the fact that in normal people, memory is not a unitary faculty of mind but has two major forms—declarative (now also called explicit) and procedural (now also called implicit). Declarative memory, which is the memory H.M. lost, is a memory for facts and events—such as recalling your first love experience. Procedural memory is a memory for perceptual or motor skill, such as recalling how to ride a bicycle, to hit a backhand, to speak a grammatically correct sentence. Recall of declarative memory requires a conscious effort not required for procedural memory. In another major step forward, Squire was able to develop one of the first animal models in the nonhuman primate of the type of amnesia sustained by H.M. In this model, Squire was able to pinpoint the hippocampus as a critical component of the declarative memory system of the medial temporal lobe. Squire describes the hippocampus as being critical for the storage of declarative information about places, people, and objects. This is the memory H.M. has lost. Other structures in the brain such as the amygdala, the striatum, and the cerebellum store procedural information about emotion, perception, and motor skills. These are a set of memory processes that H.M. retained. Finally, Squire describes his own experimental work in which he found that both declarative and procedural forms of memory have stages: a short-term form lasting minutes to hours that does not require the synthesis of new proteins, and a long-term form lasting days, weeks, or the lifetime of an individual that does require the synthesis of new proteins. Dan Schacter: The Seven Sins of Memory: How the Mind Forgets and Remembers: In an earlier book, Searching for Memory, Schacter, a professor at Harvard, outlines the basic features of declarative (explicit) forms of memory with an emphasis on a subcomponent of declarative memory called episodic, which is concerned with events, past and present. In this new book, he discusses the fallibility of this component of declarative memory by showing that it is highly suggestible and susceptible to distortion. Schacter describes these imperfections and calls these errors the seven sins of memory. These include three sins of omission—transcience, absentmindedness, and blocking, and four sins of commission—misattribution, suggestibility, bias, and persistence. Schacter uses these insights into how the mind forgets and distorts not only to reveal the fragility of memory and its extraordinary susceptibility to influence by authority figures; he also uses these errors in the memory system as an approach to gaining a better understanding of the fundamental processes of how explicit memory is encoded, stored, and retrieved. Recent theoretic work by Yadin Dudai (below) and Schacter have revealed that one of the consequences of having a memory for events that is not a faithful reproduction of what occurred by a Proustian type of reconstruction may allow us to imagine, contemplate, and plan a future based on that past. Yadin Dudai's Memory from A to Z: Keywords, Concepts, and Beyond: Any question that remains unanswered after reading Bourtchouladze, Squire, and Schacter are answered by Dudai, a professor at the Weizmann Institute in Israel. This entertaining and extraordinarily well-written primer ranges widely and gives one insights into the unresolved scientific philosophical issues that confront research on the one hand and some of the molecular insights on the other. The book serves as a handy reference, accessible to the general reader, about the biological details of memory storage.