Category Archives: neurology

Eric A. Kandel, The Age of Insight (2012)

Eric Kandel, The Age of Insight (2012)Eric A. Kandel, The Age of Insight (2012), 508p.

On April 16, Eric Kandel spoke at the Rubin Museum about his new book ‘The Age of Insight.’ The dialog between Prochnik and Kandel was lacking poignant questions, but Kandel’s personal history and his love of talking, so typical for a man his age and standing, or his art of story telling was both highly amusing and slightly obnoxious. I decided to buy and read his book because I love the encompassing space of art, science and the mind. Kandel is a charming and inspiring man of age and an accomplished neuropsychiatrist who in 2000 won the Nobel prize for his work on memory storage.

Kandel was born in 1929 in Vienna and escaped the Nazi terror with his family in 1938. Kandel’s book traces back the Fin de Siecle of Vienna and in a way re-invents his own life as he seems to imagine it. He looks back on his personal history and the history of the science of the mind, the two paths merge in the course of Kandel’s career. Kandel happily borrows from this magnificent era in Viennese history to write about a science of beauty. Continue reading