Summary
Owen Pearn (Owen Parachute)
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Eric Kandel won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2000 for work on how the brain creates memories.
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To enquire about personal, private help with forgetting something or remembering something in a different way, see if we’re a match.
Top photo via h heyerlein / Unsplash
‘No, listen. I’ve got it now. You meet a girl: shy, unassuming. If you tell her she’s beautiful, she’ll think you’re sweet, but she won’t believe you. She knows that beauty lies in your beholding.’
Patrick Rothfuss (The Name of the Wind)
Video: Portraiture and the Beholder’s Share: A Brain Science Perspective
(20 mins) Eric Kandel at TEDxMet 2013
Note: At 11:27, there is 18 seconds of missing audio.
The more you love a memory, the stronger and stranger it becomes.
Vladimir Nabokov (Lolita)
In Search of Memory
Book: In Search of Memory: The Emergence of a New Science of Mind
Documentary: In Search of Memory
(2 mins) Trailer
Learning and memory are two of the most magical capabilities of our mind. Learning is the biological process of acquiring new knowledge about the world, and memory is the process of retaining and reconstructing that knowledge over time. Most of our knowledge of the world and most of our skills are not innate but learned. Thus, we are who we are in large part because of what we have learned and what we remember and forget. In this Review, we examine the molecular, cellular, and circuit mechanisms that underlie how memories are made, stored, retrieved, and lost.
Ample data now indicate that in many types of memory, the reactivation of the long-term trace upon its retrieval can result in transient destabilization of the trace that may lead to its change.
Lee and his colleagues (Lee et al., 2012) have addressed this issue in the gill-withdrawal reflex in Aplysia and found that indeed, the same sensory motor synapses that store long-term facilitation are destabilized by protein degradation during reactivation and restabilized by protein synthesis afterward. This cellular change parallels the behavioral performance on memory retrieval. This finding indicates that the long-term memory trace, once formed, remains potentially dynamic even in simple reflexes at the level of the individual neurons and synapses that have encoded the memory in the first place.
Eric R. Kandel, Yadin Dudai, Mark R. Mayford
The Molecular and Systems Biology of Memory
There are three side effects of acid: enhanced long-term memory, decreased short-term memory, and I forget the third.
Timothy Leary
