The Age Of Insight Eric Kandel is a titan of modern
neuroscience. He won the Nobel Prize in 2000 not simply for
discovering a new set of scientific facts (although he has
discovered plenty of those), but for pioneering a new scientific
approach. As he recounts in his memoir In Search of Memory,
Kandel demonstrated that reductionist techniques could be
applied to the brain, so that even something as mysterious as
memory might be studied in sea slugs, as a function of kinase
enzymes and synaptic proteins. (The memories in question
involved the “habituation” of the slugs to a poke; they
basically got bored of being prodded.) Because natural selection
is a deeply conservative process – evolution doesn’t mess with
success – it turns out that humans rely on almost all of the
same neural ingredients as those inveterbrates. Memory has a
nearly universal chemistry. But Kandel is not just one of the
most important scientists of our time – he’s also an omnivorous
public intellectual, deeply knowledgeable about everythin