Who Am I and If So How Many? (9 page)

A large part of our unconscious draws on these kinds of dimly discerned perceptions. Another substantial portion is culled from our experiences in the womb and over the first three years of life. During this time, we register a great deal quite intensively, but our associative cortex is not mature enough to store these events as conscious experiences. About two-thirds of our personality evolves in this manner, but we cannot recall or reflect on those experiences later.

There are still more elements to the unconscious beyond our everyday unconscious perceptions and the early childhood
unconscious
impressions buried deep within us. One example is when we’re on ‘autopilot.’ I have often been surprised by how well I’m able to make my way home in a state of complete intoxication and arrive safely, even though the next day I can’t recall a moment of
the walk home. And as I sit here typing this sentence, how do my fingers find the keys on the keyboard in a mere tenth of a second? If someone were to ask me to draw a keyboard that is covered up, I imagine I’d have trouble labeling any keys correctly. Evidently my fingers know more than I do! And so many things that I have experienced and then forget will occur to me all of a sudden when something triggers them, even though they were not on the surface of my consciousness in the interim. The standard example is aromas that have the power to conjure up a whole chain of long-lost images in our heads.

Keeping all the above in mind, we have to admit that Freud was substantially correct. Most of what goes on in our brains occurs on an unconscious level, and this unconscious activity affects us powerfully. We might even say that unconscious perceptions are the norm, and the conscious ones – which are of course especially important to us – are the exception. Our awareness depends on the involvement of the associative cortex, which, it should be noted, is clearly dependent on the unconscious. As we saw in the previous chapter, feelings are the glue that binds. Without unconscious impulses from the limbic system, the associative cortex would have nothing to obtain, consider, assess, and express. It would be a high-performance machine devoid of electricity. The unconscious thus controls our consciousness far more strongly than the other way around. In our personal development it originated before consciousness, and it shaped us long before our consciousness began to awaken. The sum of our unconscious experiences and abilities – subconsciousness – is a powerful force over which we have little control. The most common route to our subconscious mind is by way of psychotherapy administered by others.

Brain researchers today dream of a psychoanalysis informed by neuroscience. A 1979 essay (‘Psychotherapy and the Single Synapse’) by Eric Kandel, the world-famous researcher on memory, laid out his ambitious vision of fusing the two disciplines. But to psychoanalysts, Kandel’s suggestions for a new scientific accuracy read like an ascetic diet, devoid of speculations or bold
claims or fantasies about curing mental and physical ailments with psychoanalysis. Instead, he proposes the use of empirical research, statistics, strict outcomes assessments, and the use of brain scans and magnetic resonance imaging to verify the progress of therapy in individual regions of the brain.

The use of the experimental methods of neuroscience to explore the unconscious is just getting under way. The unconscious, a stepchild of philosophy, which first began to be taken seriously in the second half of the nineteenth century, may well be today’s key area of research on the path to a scientific self-awareness. Epistemology informed by biology thus sees humankind doubly bound: first by our senses, with the typical abilities and by the typical limits of the primate brain, and second, by the boundary between consciousness and subconsciousness. The access into the unconscious that constitutes the great majority of our experiences and our personality is largely blocked to us. Before we move on to questions of our behavior in the second part of this book, we need to have a closer look at one more aspect that has been tacitly understood up to this point: memory. What is memory, and how does it function?

Eric Kandel has certainly earned the right to rest on his laurels, but basking in all his past accomplishments is not in his nature. Sporting wide suspenders, a flashy red bow tie with blue polka dots, and a gray pinstripe suit, he stands straight as an arrow in his study, looking like one of the Broadway greats from the 1950s. But Kandel is not an entertainer. He is the world’s foremost memory researcher.

His twelfth-floor office is simply furnished but inviting. The scholarly tomes on the bookshelf are dog-eared, among them a thick, well-worn copy of
Principles
of Neural Science
, the standard neuroscience textbook, which made Kandel famous. On the windowsill are photos of his family and colleagues. Through the tinted glass you can see Upper Manhattan; down below, the traffic on Riverside Drive crawls through this desolate area of dark high-rises, housing projects, and barbed wire. Ten years have passed since Kandel was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for a lifetime of memory research full of sparkling ideas and astounding discoveries. He has spent the second half of his long career up here on this floor. The crowded laboratories down the corridor from his office look the way they do everywhere in the
world, but the unremarkable interior is deceptive. The Howard Hughes Medical Institute at Columbia University is one of the world’s leading institutions in the field of neuroscience. And the lively octogenarian behind it all has no intention of relaxing into retirement. Kandel still holds sway over a large number of eager colleagues, and is still in the prime of his research.

Sometimes it is hard to tell whether the world is made up of atoms or of stories. Eric Richard Kandel’s story begins with Hitler’s invasion of Austria. On November 7, 1938, little Erich was given a blue battery-operated remote-control model car for his ninth birthday. His parents, a Jewish couple in Vienna, owned a toy store, and the car was Erich’s pride and joy. Two days later, late in the evening, the family was startled by loud banging on the apartment door. It was
Kristallnacht
(Night of the Shattered Glass), and anti-Semitism descended on Vienna more brutally than anywhere else in the Greater German Reich. Erich, his mother, and his brother had to leave the apartment. His father was taken into custody, interrogated, and humiliated, and did not return to his family for ten days. For an entire year, the Kandels endured increasing persecution by the Nazi regime; they were robbed of their belongings, forced out of their home, and stripped of their rights. Erich’s father was unemployed, and Erich lost all his friends. The Jewish community organization in Vienna helped keep the family afloat. In April 1939, the sons were able to leave for the United States, and their parents followed later. The surviving Jews’ pledge to ‘never forget’ always stayed with Erich. His parents had trouble adapting to life in New York, but Erich, who now went by Eric, settled in quickly. He attended the Yeshivah of Flatbush, a well-known Hebrew day school, then Erasmus Hall High School on Flatbush Avenue. He was one of two Erasmus graduates (in a class of more than 1,150) to be accepted to Harvard; both were awarded scholarships. There he met Anna Kris, who came from a family of psychoanalysts. He fell in love with Anna, but even more with psychoanalysis, calling it ‘the most fascinating science there is – imaginative, comprehensive, and empirical all at the same time.’
Kandel immersed himself in the writings of Sigmund Freud and discovered ‘the only promising approach to understanding the mind.’ To become a psychoanalyst, though, he would have to study medicine, which he considered to be ‘an indescribably boring subject.’ In the fall of 1955, he sat in the office of Harry Grundfest at Columbia University and laid out his research interests to the astonished neurophysiologist: ‘I want to find out where Freud’s “ego,” “id,” and “superego” are located in the human brain.’

Thinking back to that time sends him into gales of laughter – a series of sharply inhaled breaths that sound like the mating call of a hornbill. In his engaging narrative style, a blend of Viennese charm, Jewish humor, and American nonchalance, he tells about his evolution from dreamer to serious scientist. Grundfest advised him to look at one brain cell at a time, and to use a simple animal for his experiments. After all, Freud had also begun as a neurobiologist and tried to develop his theory of the ‘psychic apparatus’ on the basis of neural science. Kandel wanted to venture into territory beyond what the limited knowledge in Freud’s time had offered. Over the next two decades, he would spend more time with
Aplysia
, a giant marine snail, than with his wife. His first experiments with microelectrodes attached to crayfish neurons sent the budding neuroscientist into raptures. You can feel his euphoria even today when he stretches his arms and his crescendoing voice declares: ‘I listened to the deep, hidden thoughts of my crayfish!’ But
Aplysia
proved still more spectacular. ‘It was large, proud, attractive, and intelligent.’
Aplysia
is an uncomplicated animal, with a mere 20,000 brain neurons, as opposed to 100 billion in humans. Some of these cells are fifty times as large as in mammals, and they can be seen with the naked eye. Kandel threw himself into his work with boundless enthusiasm.

Kandel paints a glowing picture of the excitement of those early days, a world in which there is nothing more thrilling than brain research, exploring an unknown continent, akin to
seventeenth-century
astronomy and the Renaissance voyages of discovery. In the 1950s and 1960s, the brain was largely uncharted territory. And
the path from
Aplysia
neurons to the explanation of human feelings, thinking, and behavior could hardly be longer. But Kandel was optimistic. The biochemical building blocks of the cells of marine snails and man were largely the same. He guessed that the cell mechanisms that underlie learning and memory might have remained intact during evolution and might function in at least a similar manner in all living creatures. He administered mild electroshocks at the tip of the tail of the
Aplysia
to stimulate gill withdrawal reflexes, observed the reaction in selected neurons, and found that they were altered. He soon realized that ‘learning,’ in the short-term memory of the
Aplysia
, increased the plasticity of the synapses and strengthened synaptic connections. His first essays about marine snail ‘learning’ amazed his colleagues, and he reveled in the knowledge that his magic tricks had worked. ‘The mammal chauvinists didn’t know what to think,’ he told me. ‘They had believed that experiments of this kind would work only with mammals.’

The terrain onto which Kandel had ventured – memory research – could not have been more mystifying. The term ‘memory’ is hard to pin down. After all, doesn’t memory go to the very heart of our identity? Without it, we would have neither biography nor life – certainly not a conscious life. Understanding requires relating information to something else we know, and we can know only what we have stored. To understand the sentence you have just read, you have to recognize the individual words and at the same time get the gist of the sentence as a whole – its
meaning
. And it is helpful to recall the sentences you read before, not word for word, but at least their essential
meaning
. I put the word ‘meaning’ in italics because it tells us something significant: as a rule, we don’t store words and sentences in our brains, but something along the lines of personal essences, the
meanings
that these things have for us. This applies not only to words but to everything. Very few of us could draw from memory faces that are familiar to us – even talented artists have trouble doing so. If I think about my grandfather, whom I loved very much as a child, I see
images and selected scenes that form small emotional snippets, more like film clips than full-fledged films. And when I picture my own apartment, I never see all the rooms before me at the same time, but only individual rooms, or parts of them.

How can we explain these blurry film clips? How does information evolve into meaning? And who determines the selection? Why do I still know the name of the dog who lived downstairs when I was in elementary school, but forget to call my wife on the anniversary of the day we met, even though I know the date full well, and the dog means nothing to me, while my wife means so much? When I was trying to think of an example, why did I light on that dog, after not having thought about him for a good thirty-two years? Memory, it would appear, is for the most part elusive. It flashes through your mind and appears before your eyes unawares. You have little control over it; in fact, you cannot even opt to forget what you remember! What is this unspecified power of memory that plucks certain images from a shadowy oblivion and sends them back to my consciousness? How much of my memory is conscious and how much unconscious? Who or what controls the transfer of conscious knowledge into the storage chest of the forgotten and now and then pulls out one thing or another? Not too long ago, when I visited Berlin after a twelve-year hiatus, I happily inhaled that well-remembered and unmistakable odor wafting up from the subway, yet I hadn’t realized that I had ever noticed it before – or that I evidently had pleasant associations with it. Am I the one doing the remembering, or does memory have an intangible life of its own? Am I really the subject of the process of recollection, or more like the object?

The fact that our brains store meanings rather than data makes memory research quite a challenging endeavor. Someday,
neuroscience
will find a way to
describe
all the processes – genetically, chemically, and electrophysiologically – but will it
understand
them? What do our insights into molecular interaction really tell us about human memory? Memory research appears to represent a
far headier task for philosophers and psychologists than research on feelings or subconsciousness.

When we engage our memories, we think of thoughts and feelings that have left traces in the brain. We think and feel them again, somewhat the way we did the first time around. A small group of so-called savants, people who are capable of astonishing feats of memory, are a notable exception. In the film
Rain Man
, Dustin Hoffman played an autistic savant based on the story of Kim Peek. Peek, who lived in Salt Lake City until his death in December 2009 at the age of fifty-eight, knew some twelve thousand books by heart, word for word, and could tell you off the cuff what day of the week was associated with any calendar date you could name. But he paid a high price. Peek, who lived with his father, was unable to dress himself, scramble eggs, or make a sandwich. Some memory researchers see savants as a unique window into the human brain, but unfortunately the information they provide is perplexing. Because some specific brain functions are absent or diminished in the majority of savants, they compensate for these deficits by switching to different circuits that sometimes produce astonishingly high-level achievements. But science has yet to figure out why a savant like Stephen Wiltshire can take a forty-five-minute flight over Rome, a city he has never seen before, then draw each individual house from memory, right down to the correct number of windows, or why he fails to pick up on meanings but instead amasses chunks of information.

There is, of course, a plus side to the fact that we nonsavants forget so much of what we experience. Memories embellish our lives, but forgetting is what makes them bearable. But how do recalling and forgetting take place? Brain researchers now divide memory into declarative (explicit) and nondeclarative (tacit) memory, a distinction that parallels consciousness and
subconsciousness
. Declarative memory retrieves what is consciously experienced or deliberated, and is subject to ‘declarative’
expression
; hence the name. Nondeclarative memory applies to what we store unwittingly, as in the case of my subway smells in Berlin.
Both types of memory can in turn be subdivided, somewhat like the various facets of the self and the unconscious. Declarative memory has three distinct components: episodic memory, factual memory, and familiarity memory. Episodic memory accompanies us on a conscious level throughout our everyday lives. Noteworthy things that happen to me today, things that grab my attention and matter to me, enter into this episodic memory. Of all the types of memory, this is the one that most strongly shapes my self-image and my identity. This is where we ‘invent,’ in the words of the novelist Max Frisch, ‘the biography we come to regard as our life.’

The things that do not mesh with the movie of my life, where I play the lead and others who are important to me have supporting roles, are consigned to factual memory. The words I am now writing about memory come from this factual memory and may now also enter into yours. Recipes and bank account numbers, timetables for trains I take on a regular basis, all my knowledge about the world is stored here. But this memory requires a particular set of conditions to function. In order for me to recognize the things in my life, I have to know that I know them. The familiarity memory sees to that, telling me whether something seems familiar to me. Normally it does not take long to figure that out. This memory seems to work fairly effortlessly and
automatically
: I know whether I know something or not, and the number of uncertain exceptions is very limited. The automatic nature of familiarity memory functions much like nondeclarative memory; it is intuitive memory in which consciousness plays little or no role. The previous chapter mentioned ‘knowing’ fingers on the computer keyboard and ‘knowing’ feet heading home. Clearly they remember the correct keys and the correct route astonishingly well without requiring much input from a slower-operating (or alcohol-impaired) consciousness. An experienced driver shifts gears ‘automatically’ and analyzes traffic situations ‘intuitively.’ A good soccer forward makes a split-second decision where to shoot, and a goalie raises his arms ‘reflexively.’ In all these processes, the nondeclarative memory of our subconsciousness is at work.