In Search of Memory, by Eric R. Kandel

This is your brain; this is the world inside your brain

In Search of Memory: The Emergence of a New Science of Mind
Rating: 5 ants.
Without doubt, the best explanation of how your brain learns, remembers, and builds your personal world.

Why does practice make perfect? How do you remember your name from one day to the next? Why do people recall vividly where they were on September 11, 2001, but not on September 9?

In his remarkable book, In Search of Memory, Eric Kandel answers these questions by interweaving his personal story with his fascinating discoveries as a brain researcher. Working from the 1950s to the present time, Kandel and his coworkers have completely changed our understanding of how the brain works.

One of their most startling discoveries is that the brain is far more plastic and adaptable than scientists had thought. It does not contain a fixed number of neurons and neural connections. It will build more as it is challenged and stimulated by the outside world. And the more emotion is associated with an event or action, the more indelible the memory becomes. Hormones released by emotions interact with the proteins that carry information to build a vivid long-term memory of an event. In a very real sense, we don’t remember an event so much as how we felt about it.

But it’s when Kandel and his group study the process of vision that it becomes clear how our senses and memories build a deeply personal view of the world. Our eyes do not see objects, only edges and shapes, like bits of data. These bits are assembled in the brain into a mosaic-like image, which we must learn to recognize and then name and then remember. Anyone who has watched a baby or toddler learn to identify objects and people can see this process in action.

But the brain also filters out what is not essential or important to our immediate needs. As a result, we don’t experience the world as it is. We see only what we pay attention to. We remember only what is important to us. Moment to moment, our brain is perceiving and naming this “self”centered world into being, disregarding the rest. The process is so automatic we don’t even know we are doing it.

This is a rich, compelling journey into a man’s life and into the human brain. The complexity and astonishing intricacy of the world contained in our skulls is worth every moment you will spend with this book. --Sue B.