Eric Kandel: biography of this neuroscientist

Kandel is especially known for his studies on memory, which won him a Nobel Prize.

Erik Kandel (1929-) is an Austrian neuroscientist based in the United States, whose studies have been fundamental to the molecular understanding of cognitive processes. For this same work, he received the Nobel Prize in Medicine and Physiology in 2000, specifically after investigating learning and memory and its synaptic correlate.

In this article we will see a biography of Eric Kandelas well as some elements of his academic career and his main theoretical proposals.

Eric Kandel: biography of a neurologist of learning and memory.

Eric Kandel was born in Vienna on November 7, 1929. Together with his mother, Charlotte Zimela, and his father, Hermann Kandel, young Eric left Austria in 1938, after Germany annexed the country in the same year. In 1939, and under the same context, Eric Kandel, Ludwig (his older brother), and later his parents, moved to Brooklyn, New York, where some of their relatives were already living.

Once settled in this city, Eric Kandel began his academic training at Yeshiva of Flatbush and later at Erasmus Hall High School. Years later, he joined Harvard Universitywhere he pursued a degree in history and literature. Specifically, he was researching the attitudes of National Socialism in various German writers.

In this context, Kandel encountered the dominant theories of European and American psychology, an issue that soon led Kandel to redirect his studies. It was the paradigm of . B. F. Skinner who dominated the studies on learning and memory.. However, Kandel did not agree to defend the strict separation between psychology (the unobservable) and behavior (the observable), which was at the basis of the proposals of the behaviorist psychologist.

At the same time, but in the opposite direction, was another Austrian neurologist, Sigmund Freud, who had studied at the beginning of his career the neurological roots of conflict and psychic activityaccording to Freudian psychoanalysis. Influenced also by Ana Kris, who had also emigrated from Vienna with her psychoanalyst parents, Erik Kandel took an important interest in studying psychology from this paradigm.

Early studies in psychoanalysis and the neurophysiology laboratory.

The easiest way to become a professional psychoanalyst at this time was to study physics and later psychiatry. Thus, Kandel enrolled in chemistry courses and subsequently joined the NYU Medical School. After receiving this training, and in the course of his training as a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, Erik Kandel became very interested in understanding the Biological basis of the mind. understanding the biological basis of the mind..

This led him to collaborate with Wade Marshall, who was one of the most renowned young scientists in brain studies in the United States. Together with other neurologists, Marshall had systematized the first paradigm of the neural representation in the brain of a sensory system. These studies were the first significant proposal for the existence of topographical and systematic maps in the brain. topographic and systematic maps on the sensory surface of touch, vision and hearing..

In this context, Eric Kandel was not only interested in investigating problems in psychiatry and psychoanalysis in biological terms, but also in finding the cellular and molecular mechanisms of complex processes such as learning and memory.

The biology of memory

During his career, Eric Kandel has studied the cellular structure of the hippocampus and, from there, has proposed theories on the biology of memory. Not only that, but together with the work of Arvid Carlsson and Paul Greengard, who have explained the mechanism of action of dopamine and other neurotransmitters, Erik Kandel has proposed molecular systems of action of learning and memory.

These studies earned these three researchers the Nobel Prize in Medicine and Physiology in 2000. in 2000. In addition, these studies have had an important impact on the explanations of brain activity in different disorders such as Parkinson's disease, Alzheimer's disease, depression, schizophrenia, among others. It is one of the most important contributions of the 20th century, a time when neurosciences and the study of synapses have been of special relevance.

Kandel's studies have been carried out with different animal species, both vertebrates and invertebrates, and his results have been applied to the understanding of human beings. Kandel suggests that memory is localized in the synapses.Therefore, changes in the function of synapses are determinant in the consolidation, loss and structuring of memory, and consequently of learning. Specifically through this, long-term synaptic alterations have been studied as well as possible strategies to revert them.

Eric Kandel is currently a senior investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, is a member of the Scientific Council of the Brain and Behavior Research Foundation, and has served as chair of the neuroscience department at Columbia University.