Kandel autobiography pdf

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How very sad that when it ends up the same way, at the end of a paltry eighty-eight years, it is done out of pity."

I loved and sympathised with her descriptions of her attitude to becoming a wife and housewife: "I threw myself into the 'part' of wife, cook, cleaner, provider, as if it were a job that would last only for the run of the play.

Tauc was quite enthusiastic about my approach, which proved even more effective than anticipated. This encouraged us to write in our 1965 paper in the British Journal of Physiology:

"The fact that the EPSPs (excitatory postsynaptic potentials) can be facilitated for over half-an-hour with an input pattern scheme designed to simulate a behavioral conditioning paradigm, also suggests that the concomitant changes in the efficacy of synaptic transmission may underlie certain simple forms of information storage in the intact animal."

A brief return to the Harvard Medical School
Upon completing a very productive 16-month stay in Tauc's laboratory, I returned to Harvard in November 1963.

My father had already died but my mother came to the graduation ceremony, and in his introductory remarks Gerson D. Cohen, the chancellor of the seminary, referred to my having received a good Hebrew education at the Yeshiva of Flatbush, an acknowledgement which filled my mother's Jewish heart with pride. It occurred to me that the paradigms they described - habituation, sensitization, classical conditioning, and operant conditioning - could readily be adapted to experiments with an isolated Aplysia ganglion using artificial electrical rather than natural sensory stimuli.

Work by students of comparative behavior, such as Konrad Lorenz, Niko Tinbergen, and Karl von Frisch, had already shown that certain behavior patterns, including elementary forms of learning, were common to humans and simple animals. Even though we were now quite familiar with the hippocampus, it would be extremely difficult to work out how sensory information specific to learning reached the hippocampus or how learned information processed by the hippocampus might influence motor output.

Alden and I therefore became convinced that to make headway with the study of learning at the cellular level required a very different approach.

At Harvard I majored in 19th and 20th century European history and literature and wrote my honors dissertation on The Attitude Toward National Socialism of Three German Writers: Carl Zuckmayer, Hans Carossa, and Ernst Junger. What was unleashed upon Vienna had nothing to do with seizure of power in Germany ...

Much like behavioral long-term memory, the long-term synaptic changes required new protein synthesis while the short-term changes did not. Lashley explored the surface of the cerebral cortex in the rat, and systematically removed different cortical areas. I had taken part in a dozen battles in the First World War, had experienced barrages, gassings, going over the top.

I thought it would be interesting to compare the pyramidal neurons to the only other mammalian neurons that had been well studied at that time - the motor neurons of the spinal cord. Second, we found that the hippocampal neurons, unlike motor neurons, were not silent in the absence of synaptic activity, but tended to fire spontaneously, and that this firing often took the form of bursts of spikes that were maintained by summation of depolarizing afterpotentials.

First, it brought us back to New York and closer to my parents and to Denise's mother, all of whom were having medical problems that benefited from our being nearby. (Denise summarized it simply: 'What?" she said, "throw your scientific career away?") Instead, I made my third decision. Born in Czechoslovakia, Tauc had originally studied the electrical properties of plant cells.

In the 1930s he was arguably the most promising and accomplished young scientist working on the brain in the United States. We lived in an apartment above the store.

It is therefore not surprising that a key point in the Nazi program, from its beginning in the 1920s, was a merger of all German-speaking people into a Greater Germany. Our lab and those of Alcino Silva and Dan Storm found that the cAMP, PKA, and CREB switch were required for long-term forms of synaptic plasticity in the hippocampus, was also required for spatial memory.

A molecular approach to the cognitive map of space in the hippocampus: steps toward a molecular biology of attention
With this background information about genes, LTP, and spatial memory, we now could ask a deeper question: How does an animal learn about extrapersonal space?