How Reductionism Uncovered Secrets of Long-term and Short-term Memory | Eric Kandel | Big Think

How Reductionism Uncovered Secrets of Long-term and Short-term Memory | Eric Kandel

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A powerful scientific method of observation has helped scientists understand the brain. That method closely parallels Nobel Prize-winner Eric Kandel's journey to make his most famous discoveries.The human brain has become the premier object of study for fields ranging from psychology to machine learning and artificial intelligence. What we know about the brain has expanded greatly in the last quarter century, thanks primarily to a specific method of scientific inquiry: reductionism. As Nobel Prize-winning scientist Eric Kandel explains, this process of breaking apparently whole parts into smaller units gives a real sense of the brain's underlying mechanisms.

Kandel's personal story of how he made new discoveries about the brain parallel his own reductionist method: by breaking down the steps he went through, we can better understand how scientific discoveries are made. In this case, they were surprisingly haphazard. Indeed Kandel was not schooled in neuroscience at all. He was primarily interested in psychoanalysis, and in his senior year of school, was given the chance to study the biology of the brain at the National Insitutes of Health.

Once there, he pursued specific methods of breaking down individual brain regions into component parts, observing how individual neurons reacted to stimulus, and how they worked to store memories in the brain. This method — reductionism — revealed to Kandel the difference between long-term and short-term memory, and the plastic nature of the brain itself. His life's work is an example of the surprising ways scientific discovery can happen, and the creativity involved in reaching new understandings of the world — and ourselves.

Eric Kandel's most recent book is Reductionism in Art and Brain Science.

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ERIC KANDEL :

Dr. Eric Kandel is University Professor and Fred Kavli Professor and Director of the Kavli Institute for Brain Science at the Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons. His most recent book is The Age of Insight: The Quest to Understand the Unconscious in Art, Mind, and Brain, from Vienna 1900 to the Present.

Kandel's research has shown that learning produces changes in behavior by modifying the strength of connections between nerve cells, rather than by altering the brain's basic circuitry. He went on to determine the biochemical changes that accompany memory formation, showing that short-term memory involves a functional modulation of the synapses while long-term memory requires the activation of genes and the synthesis of proteins to grow new synaptic connections. For this work, the Austrian-born Kandel was awarded the 2000 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.

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TRANSCRIPT :

Eric Kandel: What reductionism allows you to do is to take a complex problem and focus on one component of it and try to understand it in some detail. And sometimes you can just do it by focusing on one component, other times it requires selecting a particular biological system if you're working in biology, in which that component is prominent or easy to study. And that allows you to study in depth the problem. It will be hard to do if you looked at it in all its complexities.

For me the reductionist approach was really very profitable and not something that I really thought a lot about before. I originally went to medical school with the idea of becoming a psychoanalyst. I didn't have a strong biological background at all. And then in my senior year at medical school there was a five-month elective period in which you could do whatever you wanted to and I thought that even a psychoanalyst should know something about the brain. And so I took an elective in brain science. There were very few people doing brain science in those days, but Columbia had an outstanding person, Harry Grenfist. And I worked in his lab and I worked with one of his associates Don Perpera and had an absolutely spectacular experience.

I mean actually doing science is so different than reading about it. There's a sensual pleasure of doing the experiments; there's the fun of thinking about it coming up with a new finding. I just thought it was marvelous. And Denise and I had just decided to get married and we had dinner one night and I remember saying to her, "You know, I could see doing this for the rest of my life but it's completely unrealistic.

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