Eric Kandel: From Memory to Memory!

Eric Kandel, M.D., who was awarded the Nobel Prize in 2000 for discovering molecular mechanisms of memory storage, told the crowd at last week’s Flexner Discovery Lecture (https://news.vumc.org/2017/05/11/discovery-lecturer-kandel-tackles-age-related-memory-loss/) that he has recently become interested in memory in the aging brain. “We’ve been studying age-related memory loss, and not a moment too soon,” quipped the 87-year-old Kandel, University Professor and Fred Kavli Professor in the Department of Neuroscience at Columbia University.

“There are many people in the field…who think that the Aplysia rather than the investigator should have won the Nobel Prize,” Kandel said.

In more recent work, Kandel and his colleagues have turned their attention to age-related memory loss. The researchers wondered, Kandel said, if memory loss during normal aging is a distinct process or an early phase of Alzheimer’s disease.

They determined that mice, which do not experience spontaneous Alzheimer’s disease, also experience age-related memory loss, suggesting that the two processes are distinct, he said. Other studies showed that brain regions involved in age-related memory loss and Alzheimer’s disease are different.

Extract: Patagonia & Nudibranch: Einstein, Music & Memory!

©2015 Am Ang Zhang

No I did not do any diving in Patagonia!

We were having dinner at our Ecocamp in Patagonia with a very interesting couple.

The husband is aiming to climb the Matterhorn and somehow in the conversation we talked about their other adventures that included Diving. I show them some of my underwater pictures. Somehow Nudibranch was mentioned and as it turned out we exchange email addresses and became good friends.

Nudibranch reminded me of Aplysia and Kandel:

Nudibranch © 2009 Irene Man

Nudibranch is so named because of its naked gills.

Here is a description in The National Geographic:

Nudibranchs crawl through life as slick and naked as a newborn. Snail kin whose ancestors shrugged off the shell millions of years ago, they are just skin, muscle, and organs sliding on trails of slime across ocean floors and coral heads the world over.

Found from sandy shallows and reefs to the murky seabed nearly a mile down, nudibranchs thrive in waters both warm and cold and even around billowing deep-sea vents. 

So why, in habitats swirling with voracious eaters, aren't nudibranchs picked off like shrimp at a barbecue? The 3,000-plus known nudibranch species, it turns out, are well equipped to defend themselves. Not only can they be tough-skinned, bumpy, and abrasive, but they've also traded the family shell for less burdensome weaponry: toxic secretions and stinging cells. A few make their own poisons, but most pilfer from the foods they eat. Species that dine on toxic sponges, for example, alter and store the irritating compounds in their bodies and secrete them from skin cells or glands when disturbed. Other nudibranchs hoard capsules of tightly coiled stingers, called nematocysts, ingested from fire corals, anemones, and hydroids. Immune to the sting, the slugs deploy the stolen artillery along their own extremities.

Memory & Knowledge: Talmud & Taxi

In 2001 I was fortunate enough to be in New Orleans for the American Psychiatric Association Annual Conference. One of the lectures attracted a long queue and it turned out that the Nobel Laureate Eric Kandel was giving his lecture. I was fortunate enough to be able to secure a seat.

"Different forms of learning result in memories by changing that strength in different ways. Short-term memory results from transient changes that last minutes and does not require any new synthesis of proteins, Kandel said. However, long-term memories are based in more lasting changes of days to weeks that do require new brain protein to be synthesized. And this synthesis requires the input of the neuron’s genes." Eric Kandel.

In his book In Search Of Memory, he remembered his arrival in New York in 1939 after a year under the Nazi in Vienna:

“My grandfather and I liked each other a great deal, and he readily convinced me that he should tutor me in Hebrew during the summer of 1939 so that I might be eligible for a scholarship at the Yeshiva of Flatbush, an excellent Hebrew parochial school that offered both secular and religious studies at a very high level. With his tutelage I entered the Yeshiva in the fall of 1939. By the time I graduated in 1944 I spoke Hebrew almost as well as English, had read through the five books of Moses, the books of Kings, the Prophets and the Judges in Hebrew, and also learned a smattering of the Talmud.”

Eric Kandel/Amazon

“It gave me both pleasure and pride to learn later that Baruch S. Blumberg, who won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1976, had also benefited from the extraordinary educational experience provided by the Yeshivah of Flatbush.”

In Hebrew and English!!! That did not seem to have done him and Blumberg much harm. Right now some governments seem hell bent in doing away with rote learning and that includes some medical schools.

Lord Brain:

When I was training in London in the 70s, I spent some time at Queen Square. Those in the know will recognize it as the place for neurology this side of the Atlantic. It was drilled into us then that sadly we were given a number of brain cells when we were born and it was all downhill from then on or something to that effect. It was well known that neurologists were great diagnosticians but for most neurological conditions, not much could be done. How depressing indeed. Even as recently as four weeks ago, I heard a young doctor told his father that there was nothing he could do with his brain cells. One is given so many at birth and no more can be expected. Lord Brain (1895-1966) would have been so proud.

Knowledge:

Yet it was also London that shook the world with new discoveries about the brain, and the study was on the most unlikely group of people: Taxi drivers. Their “KNOWLEDGE” was the basis of our knowledge on brain plasticity today. The “KNOWLEDGE” is a term officially used to describe the test the Taxi Drivers had to take to get the license to drive Taxis in London. Streets in London have evolved over time and are not on any grid system at all. Early postmortem examinations led some pathologists to note the small size of the Taxi drivers’ frontal lobes. Yet actual weight measurement showed that size was all relative. It was the enlarged hippocampal region that created that impression. Later work using modern scanning techniques confirmed the early impressions.

Flexner Discovery Lecture (https://news.vumc.org/2017/05/11/discovery-lecturer-kandel-tackles-age-related-memory-loss/)

Links:Latin Latin revival? Brain Fitness Book,

Autobiography: Eric Kandel

Related posts:

Nobel: Kandel and Lohengrin

'The Knowledge' and the Brain

A Book Review: Knowledge, Ginkgo, Software & Brain Fitness

Kandel & Doidge: Neuroplasticity & Memory.

2014 Nobel

Christmas & Bach: Kandel & Dementia!

Christmas Anemone 

© Am Ang Zhang 2014 

As I listen to Bach's Christmas Oratorio I am reminded of the work of Kandel on memory. Why is it that listening to the same piece of music as rarely as once a year evoke such pleasing brain syntonic response.

There is now a fair bit of research on the use of music for dementia patients. This is encouraging. 

However, the work of Kandel showed that it would have been more beneficial if the memory of the music were imputed at an early age only for the brain to be stimulated at a much later age for maximum beneficial effect.

The Cockroach Catcher was very pleased to be at  La Traviata as it was one of those operas that you do know inside out. The scenes might be different but the music essentially stimulates the re-programming of Kandel's memory proteins. 

I am reminded of the grand father of one of my daughter's good friend who at the age of 102 was still playing Chopin Preludes a few days before he passed away. He had full command of his mental capacity until his death.

Could taking away much of classical music education have a devastating effect on the memory health of the nation as a whole? If so, should we not bring it back to give most of us a fighting chance?

Britain might then be able to supply the next generation of musicians as a result.

Think about it, SoS and Mr. Simon Stevens.

Eric Kandel, M.D.:

"We are what we are through what we have experienced and what we have remembered."          

In 2001 I was fortunate enough to be in New Orleans for the American Psychiatric Association Annual Conference. One of the lectures attracted a long queue and it turned out that the Nobel Laureate Eric Kandel was giving his lecture. I was fortunate enough to be able to secure a seat.


"What learning does is to change the strength of the synaptic connections in the brain," Kandel explained, "and this has held true for every form of learning so far analyzed. So, what genetic and developmental processes do is specify the cells that connect to each other, but what they do not specify is the exact strength of those connections. Environmental contingencies, such as learning, play a significant part in the strength of those connections.""Different forms of learning result in memories by changing that strength in different ways. Short-term memory results from transient changes that last minutes and does not require any new synthesis of proteins, Kandel said. However, long-term memories are based in more lasting changes of days to weeks that do require new brain protein to be synthesized. And this synthesis requires the input of the neuron’s genes."

In his book In Search Of Memory, he remembered his arrival in New York in 1939 after a year under the Nazi in Vienna:

“My grandfather and I liked each other a great deal, and he readily convinced me that he should tutor me in Hebrew during the summer of 1939 so that I might be eligible for a scholarship at the Yeshiva of Flatbush, an excellent Hebrew parochial school that offered both secular and religious studies at a very high level. With his tutelage I entered the Yeshiva in the fall of 1939. By the time I graduated in 1944 I spoke Hebrew almost as well as English, had read through the five books of Moses, the books of Kings, the Prophets and the Judges in Hebrew, and also learned a smattering of the Talmud.”

Eric Kandel/Amazon

“It gave me both pleasure and pride to learn later that Baruch S. Blumberg, who won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1976, had also benefited from the extraordinary educational experience provided by the Yeshivah of Flatbush.”

In Hebrew and English!!! That did not seem to have done him and Blumberg much harm. Right now some governments seem hell bent in doing away with rote learning and that includes some medical schools.

'IN SEARCH OF MEMORY,' BY ERIC R. KANDEL

Vienna was, as recently as 1939, the year he and his family fled the city for the United States, the most important cultural center in the German-speaking world. "The city's great tradition of scholarship provided a foundation for experiments in literature, science, music, architecture, philosophy and art, experiments from which many modern ideas were derived," he writes. "Vienna's culture was one of extraordinary power, and it had been created and nourished in good part by Jews." The Nazis drove out those Jews they did not murder, and with their departure a city of verve and excitement — a city of intense intellectualism and the acme of cultural attainment — became a prosaic place.

If there is another book that does a better job of demonstrating how biological research is done, or of telling the story of a brilliant scientist's career, I don't know it. Nor do I know one that better conveys the unique excitement that drives the success of research and permeates the thinking of its most able practitioners, or that gives a better descriptive narrative of the historical evolution of our understanding of mind. True, in places the detail is so minute and technical that certain parts of it will prove to be nearly inscrutable to any but the most diligent reader, or to those with a background in molecular science. But it hardly makes a difference if some passages are judiciously skimmed. Like the good teacher he no doubt is, Kandel has sprinkled his more abstruse sections with an occasional summary sentence that clarifies entire previous pages. His is an important and marvelous book. Sigmund Freud and the illustrious cavalcade of pioneering neuroscientists, psychologists and philosophers who have contributed so much to our understanding of the human mind during the past century would look with pleasure on it.

Nobel Lecture

La Traviata

Apparently the prima, the week before (I attended the second performance, on December 16th), was thrown into disarray when tenor Stephen Costello cancelled just an hour before the performance. There were no problems with Mr Decker’s tricky staging or ensembles on the 16th. Musically and dramatically well-prepared, soloists, chorus and orchestra were on top form. Marina Rebeka, whose only previous Met performances were as an unimpressive Donna Anna in Michael Grandage’s tedious Don Giovanni four years ago, was a superb Violetta.

Attractive, comfortable on stage (and standing on the minimalist furniture), and with a shining soprano, she negotiated the coloratura difficulties of the first act with ease, even touching on an interpolated high E flat at the close of “Sempre libera”. She has several degrees of pianissimo as well; the spun lines of “Dite alle giovane” and “Addio del passato” were lovely and touching. She uses no chest voice at all and it was occasionally missed late in the opera, but the voice opens up to a grand size when needed, and she did well with “Amami, Alfredo” and her death scene. She should be a valuable asset to New York’s opera lovers.

Other Opera Posts:

NHS: Learning From Boris

The Dark Side: Il Trovatore
Illness and Morality

Doctor Atomic

Lunar Eclipse
Lohengrin: Speech Disability, Design & Hypertension

Bayreuth: The Ruling Class & Photography

Peter Grimes: the individual against the mass

The Cockroach Catcher: NHS Reform: Choice?

The Cockroach Catcher: Empress' New Clothes

Mayo Clinic: Health Care Model? 

The Cockroach Catcher: Spring Rationing: Hospital Avoidance

Can it be that it was all so simple then

Or has time rewritten every line

If we had the chance to do it all again

Tell me - Would we? Could we?

                                                                                                                  The Way We Were                        

The Cockroach Catcher on Amazon Kindle UK, Amazon Kindle US

Review on Amazon

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