More to learn than just neuroscience

Oscar Wilde once said, “Memory... is the diary that we all carry about with us.” But how memories are formed, and whether our diaries are written in pencil or pen has been the life’s work of Nobel Prize winning neuroscientist Eric Kandel. Director Petra Seeger has crafted a very nice little Valentine to Kandel, an extraordinary man now pushing 80 who still teaches at Columbia University (which begs another relevant quote, “the number one cause of death in the elderly is retirement”). In Search of Memory has DVD and cable written all over it, but that’s not a knock. Those interested in either neuroscience or wonderful people are advised to give it a shot.

It’s fair to say that neuroscientists are not a kooky lot. But Kandel, while short of kooky, shows impish charm from the first frame as he explains what will happen in the brains of viewers watching this movie. And when the movie is over, you’ll only be vaguely closer to understanding how the mind operates, but Kandel is so enjoyable to listen to, it’s entertaining all the same. For decades, the Harvard-educated Kandel has dedicated his career to exploring what memory is (“the glue that binds our mental life together”) and how it works. In the 1960s, researchers had no idea how memory is laid down in the brain’s hippocampus. Kandel helped discover that you can actually see memory and that short term memory is chemical, while long term memory requires the visible growth of new synaptic connections. Being on the forefront of such discoveries has made him “the rock star of neuroscience,” as one young neuroscience-groupie gushes while waiting for Kandel to give a lecture in a small club where Lenny Bruce might’ve performed. Kandel is not only a physical marvel—playing tennis every week, dashing across streets and frolicking on a see-saw—but he’s still quick-witted and brilliant, supervising a group of younger neuroscientists at the Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons. The next-gen brain pioneers Kandel oversees (sadly unidentified by Seeger) push science forward by dissecting large snails, who’s floating purple ink is a beautiful and futile defense mechanism, so their cells can be harvested for experiments on their gill reflex. It’s all in the service of turning something theoretical and unexplainable into something physical and measurable. Such work helped Kandel win the Nobel Prize in 2000, the culmination of his life’s work.

Kandel’s download on the basics of neuroscience makes for a comfy lecture on a difficult topic. But what initially drove him to study neuroscience is what makes In Search of Memory (OK, I’ll say it) memorable. Kandel was born in Vienna, Austria in 1929 to a lower-middle class Jewish family. When the Nazis came to town in 1938 Kandel’s family was forced out of their home, which was then ransacked. After their father was arrested and held for a week, and their friends began abandoning them, the Kandels spent edgy nights waiting for documentation allowing them to immigrate to America, which they did in 1939. This difficult boyhood in Vienna informed Kandel’s entire life. In fact, he broke into the neuroscience biz because he wanted to study motivation, specifically how Nazis could listen to classical music one moment, then kill Jews the next. Indeed, his personal and professional lives are based on the two most important words to Jews worldwide: “never forget.”

Seeger’s cameras capture footage of Kandel, wide-eyed and emotional, returning to Vienna with wife Denise (who endured her own Nazi nightmare in France) on the occasion of their 50th wedding anniversary. He visits what remains of his childhood apartment and his father’s toy store where, he’s surprised to learn, readers of his 2006 book gather and take pictures. From this trip to Vienna emerge the unusual, maybe even disturbing, dichotomies of Kandel’s life: he’s survived horrors worth forgetting yet has spent his life studying how we remember. He fled his boyhood home, scared and hated, yet he loves it enough to return. It sounds heavy, but Seeger keeps things light. Anything else would not portray Kandel as the full-of-life personality he seems to be. There’s nothing revelatory in how Seeger constructs her story; it’s competent, employing straightforward intercutting between interview, lecture and workplace footage, along with distracting recreations of Kandel’s Vienna-based childhood. But no negatives can detract from the warm, inviting, slightly-yellowed smile of this survivor and optimist with more to teach us than just neuroscience.

Distributor: Icarus Films
Director/Producer: Petra Seeger
Genre: Documentary
Rating: Unrated
Running time: 95 min.
Release date: Fall ltd.