|
Nobel Prize-winning scientist Eric Kandel will discuss the mechanics of memory and the science of the mind in this year's Charles W. Knowlton Lecture Feb. 20 in the School of Law Auditorium.
 |
| Eric Kandel |
Kandel's 5 p.m. lecture, "We are What We Remember: Memory and the Biological Basis of Individuality," will touch on his decades-long research into the biological foundations of memory and cognition. The lecture is open to the public. Kandel also will lead a faculty seminar at noon in the law school's faculty seminar room. Call 7-6618 to reserve a seat."I would like to outline the possibillity of a new biology of the mind, a molecular biology of cognition, and suggest that it will occupy center stage in the early part of the 21st century, much as the gene occupied center stage in the last half of the 20th century," said Kandel, director of Columbia University's Kavli Institute for Brain Sciences and senior investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.
Kandel's research has focused on the physiological changes that nerve cells undergo in short-term and long-term memory storage as well as the ways in which learning causes changes in behavior by modifying nerve cell connections. He received the 2000 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his work.
The Austrian-born scientist initially planned to become a psychiatrist, but an europhysiology course at New York University shifted his interest toward research in the biology of memory.
"The cell and molecular mechanisms of learning and memory struck me as a wonderful problem to study," Kandel said. "It was clear to me even then that learning and memory were central to behavior, and thus to psychopathology and to psychotherapy."
1/07
|
