In Search of Memory: The Emergence of a New Science of Mind (3 page)

THE INSIGHTS PROVIDED BY THE NEW SCIENCE OF MIND ARE
most evident in our understanding of the molecular mechanisms the brain uses to store memories. Memory—the ability to acquire and store information as simple as the routine details of daily life and as complex as abstract knowledge of geography or algebra—is one of the most remarkable aspects of human behavior. Memory enables us to solve the problems we confront in everyday life by marshaling several facts at once, an ability that is vital to problem solving. In a larger sense, memory provides our lives with continuity. It gives us a coherent picture of the past that puts current experience in perspective. The picture may not be rational or accurate, but it persists. Without the binding force of memory, experience would be splintered into as many fragments as there are moments in life. Without the mental time travel provided by memory, we would have no awareness of our personal history, no way of remembering the joys that serve as the luminous milestones of our life. We are who we are because of what we learn and what we remember.

Our memory processes serve us best when we can easily recall the joyful events of our lives and dilute the emotional impact of traumatic events and disappointments. But sometimes, horrific memories persist and damage people’s lives, as happens in post-traumatic stress disorder, a condition suffered by some people who have experienced at first hand the terrible events of the Holocaust, of war, rape, or natural disaster.

Memory is essential not only for the continuity of individual identity, but also for the transmission of culture and for the evolution and continuity of societies over centuries. Although the size and structure of the human brain have not changed since
Homo sapiens
first appeared in East Africa some 150,000 years ago, the learning capability of individual human beings and their historical memory have grown over the centuries through shared learning—that is, through the transmission of culture. Cultural evolution, a nonbiological mode of adaptation, acts in parallel with biological evolution as the means of transmitting knowledge of the past and adaptive behavior across generations. All human accomplishments, from antiquity to modern times, are products of a shared memory accumulated over centuries, whether through written records or through a carefully protected oral tradition.

Much as shared memory enriches our lives as individuals, loss of memory destroys our sense of self. It severs the connection with the past and with other people, and it can afflict the developing infant as well as the mature adult. Down’s syndrome, Alzheimer’s disease, and age-related memory loss are familiar examples of the many diseases that affect memory. We now know that defects in memory contribute to psychiatric disorders as well: schizophrenia, depression, and anxiety states carry with them the added burden of defective memory function.

The new science of mind holds out the hope that greater understanding of the biology of memory will lead to better treatments for both memory loss and persistent painful memories. Indeed, the new science is likely to have practical implications for many areas of health. Yet it goes beyond a search for solutions to devastating illnesses. The new science of mind attempts to penetrate the mystery of consciousness, including the ultimate mystery: how each person’s brain creates the consciousness of a unique self and the sense of free will.

A
t the time of my birth, Vienna was the most important cultural center in the German-speaking world, rivaled only by Berlin, capital of the Weimar Republic. Vienna was renowned for great music and art, and it was the birthplace of scientific medicine, psychoanalysis, and modern philosophy. In addition, 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. It was home to a diverse collection of thinkers, including Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis; outstanding writers, such as Robert Musil and Elias Canetti; and the originators of modern philosophy, including Ludwig Wittgenstein and Karl Popper.

Vienna’s culture was one of extraordinary power, and it had been created and nourished in good part by Jews. My life has been profoundly shaped by the collapse of Viennese culture in 1938—both by the events I experienced that year and by what I have learned since about the city and its history. This understanding has deepened my appreciation of Vienna’s greatness and sharpened my sense of loss at its demise. That sense of loss is heightened by the fact that Vienna was my birthplace, my home.

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My parents, Charlotte and Hermann Kandel, at the time of their wedding in 1923. (From Eric Kandel’s personal collection.)

My parents met in Vienna and married in 1923 (figure 2–1), shortly after my father had established his toy store in the Eighteenth District on the Kutschkergasse (figure 2–2), a lively street that also contained a produce market, the Kutschker Market. My brother, Ludwig, was born in 1924 and I five years later (figure 2–3). We lived in a small apartment at Severingasse in the Ninth District, a middle-class neighborhood near the medical school and not far from Berggasse 19, the apartment of Sigmund Freud. As both my parents worked in the store, we had a series of full-time housekeepers at home.

I went to a school on a street appropriately named Schulgasse (School Street), located halfway between our apartment and my parents’ store. Like most elementary schools, or
Volksschulen
, in Vienna, it had a traditional, academically rigorous curriculum. I followed in the footsteps of my exceptionally gifted brother, who had had the same teachers as I. Throughout my childhood in Vienna I felt that Ludwig had an intellectual virtuosity I would never match. By the time I began reading and writing, he was starting to master Greek, to become proficient at piano, and to construct radio sets.

Ludwig had just finished building his first short-wave radio receiver a few days before Hitler’s triumphal march into Vienna in March 1938. On the evening of March 13, Ludwig and I were listening with earphones as the broadcaster described the advance of German troops into Austria on the morning of March 12. Hitler had followed in the afternoon, crossing the border first at his native village, Braunau am Inn, and then moving on to Linz. Of the 120,000 citizens of Linz, almost 100,000 turned out to greet him, screaming “Heil Hitler” in unison. In the background, the “Horst Wessel song,” a hypnotic Nazi marching song that even I found captivating, blared forth on the radio. On the afternoon of March 14, Hitler’s entourage reached Vienna, where he was greeted by a wildly enthusiastic crowd of 200,000 people in the Heldenplatz, the great central square, and hailed as the hero who had unified the German-speaking people (figure 2–4). For my brother and me, this overwhelming support for the man who had destroyed the Jewish community of Germany was terrifying.

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My parents’ toy and luggage store on the Kutschkergasse. My mother with me, or perhaps my brother. (From Eric Kandel’s personal collection.)

Hitler had expected the Austrians to oppose Germany’s annexation of their country and to demand a relatively independent German protectorate instead. But the extraordinary reception he received, even from those who had opposed him forty-eight hours earlier, convinced him that Austria would readily accept—would indeed welcome—annexation. It seemed as if everyone, from modest shopkeepers to the most elevated members of the academic community, now openly embraced Hitler. Theodor Cardinal Innitzer, the influential archbishop of Vienna, once a sympathetic defender of the Jewish community, ordered all the Catholic churches in the city to fly the Nazi flag and ring their bells in honor of Hitler’s arrival. Greeting Hitler in person, the cardinal pledged his own loyalty and that of all Austrian Catholics, the majority of the population. He promised that Austria’s Catholics would become “the truest sons of the great Reich into whose arms they had been brought back on this momentous day.” The archbishop’s only request was that the liberties of the Church be respected and its role in the education of the young guaranteed.

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My brother and I in 1933. I was three years old and Ludwig was eight. (From Eric Kandel’s personal collection.)

That night and for days to come, all hell broke loose. Viennese mobs, both adults and young people, inspired by Austrian Nazis and screaming “Down with Jews! Heil Hitler! Destroy the Jews!” erupted in a nationalistic frenzy, beating up Jews and destroying their property. They humiliated Jews by forcing them to get on their knees and scrub the streets to eliminate every vestige of anti-annexation political graffiti (figure 2–5). In my father’s case, he was forced to use a toothbrush to rid Vienna of the last semblance of Austrian independence—the word “yes” scrawled by Viennese patriots encouraging the citizenry to vote for Austria’s freedom and to oppose annexation. Other Jews were forced to carry paint buckets and to demarcate stores owned by Jews with the Star of David or with the word
Jude
(Jew). Foreign commentators, long accustomed to Nazi tactics in Germany, were astonished by the brutality of the Austrians. In
Vienna and Its Jews
, George Berkley quotes a German storm trooper: “the Viennese have managed to do overnight what we Germans have failed to achieve…up to this day. In Austria, a boycott of the Jews does not need organizing—the people themselves have initiated it.”

2–4
Hitler enters Vienna in March of 1938. He is greeted with great enthusiasm by the crowds, including groups of girls waving Nazi flags emblazoned with swastikas (above). Hitler speaks to the Viennese public in the Heldenplatz (below). The largest turnout in the history of Vienna, 200,000 people, came to hear him. (Photos courtesy of Dokumentationsarchiv des Österreichischer Widerstands and Hoover Institute Archives.)

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Jews forced to scrub the streets of Vienna to remove political graffiti advocating a free Austria. (Courtesy of Yad Vashem Photo Archives.)

In his autobiography, German playwright Carl Zuckmayer, who had moved to Austria in 1933 to escape Hitler, described Vienna during the days following the annexation as a city transformed “into a nightmare painting of Hieronymus Bosch.” It was as if:

The day after Hitler marched into Vienna, I was shunned by all of my classmates except one—a girl, the only other Jew in the class. In the park where I played, I was taunted, humiliated, and roughed up. At the end of April 1938, all the Jewish children in my elementary school were expelled and transferred to a special school run by Jewish teachers on Pantzergasse in the Nineteenth District, quite far from where we lived. At the University of Vienna, almost all Jews—more than 40 percent of the student body and 50 percent of the faculty—were dismissed. This malevolence toward Jews, of which my treatment was but a mild example, culminated in the horrors of Kristallnacht.

MY FATHER AND MOTHER HAD EACH COME TO VIENNA BEFORE
World War I, when they were very young and the city was a very different, more tolerant place. My mother, Charlotte Zimels, was born in 1897 in Kolomyya, a town of about 43,000 inhabitants on the Prut River in Galicia. This region of the Austro-Hungarian Empire near Romania was then part of Poland and is now part of Ukraine. Almost half the population of Kolomyya was Jewish, and the Jewish community had a lively culture. My mother came from a well-educated middle-class family. Although she spent only one year at the University of Vienna, she spoke and wrote English in addition to German and Polish. My father, Hermann Kandel—to whom my mother was immediately attracted because she found him handsome, energetic, and filled with humor—was born in 1898 into a poor family in Olesko, a town of about 25,000 near Lvov (Lemberg), also now part of Ukraine. He moved to Vienna with his family in 1903, when he was five. He was drafted directly from high school into the Austro-Hungarian army, fought in the First World War, and sustained a shrapnel wound in battle. After the war, he worked to support himself and never finished high school.