Learning is the means whereby we acquire new working knowledge
about the world. Memory is the means whereby we retain that
knowledge over time. Our abilities to learn and remember are
essential to our sense of self and our ability to function
effectively in daily life. Memory is the glue that holds our
mental life together. As a result, we are who we are in large
part because of what we have learned and what we remember from
past experience. But what is memory? How does the brain capture
and sustain it? Why does memory sometimes fail us? Those simple
questions, of course, have exceedingly complex answers, and many
biological details about the process of memory in humans and
other animals remain unknown. HHMI investigator Eric R. Kandel
of Columbia University, however, has provided a good start. His
studies of the molecular basis of learning and memory underpin
much of what we know about how events are recorded by the brain,
processed by individual nerve cells, and etched in gray matter.
For his work on learni