Website review: Columbia Magazine
OliviaB discovered this in Neuroscience
•3 reviews since Jan 19, 2007
neuroscience
•columbia.edu/cu/alumni/Magazine/Fall2006/kand...
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OliviaB discovered 16 months ago- interview with this brilliant brain scientist. great reading. much food for thought. are we the slaves of brain gremlins or acting from free will? mind matters Kandel's "new science of mind" is an integration of neuroscience, biology, and the study of behavior that will connect the workings of individual neurons in the brain with philosophy, sociology, economics, art, war, and manifestations of human culture. "Neuroscience is the Esperanto," Kandel says, "the humanistic language that binds it all together." His research into the molecular and cellular basis of short- and long-term memory forms the foundation for the understanding of this language. His work illuminating how signals move through neurons earned him the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2000, alongside Arvid Carlsson from the University of Göteborg in Sweden and Paul Greengard of Rockefeller University. Kandel is, as Grundfest suggested 50 years ago, taking the next step in the study of the mind. "I think it's likely that a variety of social phenomena are going to be explored at the biological level," he says.
- pauljc rated 13 months ago
- "Minding the Brain Neurobiologist Eric Kandel searches for memory, cell by cell."
- laodan rated 16 months ago
- Minding the Brain via 3QD, Samir S. Patel in Columbia Magazine
Our minds are made of countless tiny connections between neurons, through which ions, proteins, chemical messengers, and electrical signals travel. At one time this language of the mind was mysterious and impenetrable, but now we see that the workings of the brain are complex, understandable, and based in natural laws. ... Among the important concepts that Kandel established was that short-term memory is created by changes in the function of cells, while long-term memory comes from changes in the structure of the cell, and requires gene expression. The resulting patterns of connections are products of the genetic hardwiring of our brains and environmental influences \u2014 decades of learning. Genes provide the fixed mechanisms and architecture, and superimposed on that is a malleable, plastic network of strong and weak connections, the overlay of a lifetime on a mind. "Our adult repertoire represents a combination and interaction of these two sets of behavioral inventories" says Kandel. ... "People are worried that if you really understand the mind, you'll take the mystery out of it" For all the questions neurobiology can answer, it will inevitably create more. Minding the Brain
Systemic complexity involves the idea that the more you know about something the more fields you discover you don't know. The mystery of reality is contained in this notion of our inaccessibility of the whole through the accumulation of bits of knowledge or knowings. It's simply too vast. This does in no way imply that the bits of knowledge (knowings) that we can gain are not significant. They are functional. That means that they give us a better understanding of ourselves and the environment we are in, at least so far as we can perceive. Kandel's work sheds new light on the old question "free will versus determinism".
- Minding the Brain via 3QD, Samir S. Patel in Columbia Magazine
