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

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. Kandel's latest book is "Reductionism in Art and Brain Science: Bridging the Two Cultures" ().
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Transcript - 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. Read Full Transcript Here: .