Synopses
In Search of Memory
The Neuroscientist Eric Kandel
a film by Petra Seeger
A documentary biopic about Eric Kandel, winner of the Nobel Prize for Medicine, one of the most important neuroscientists of the 20th century. His autobiography "In Search of Memory" appeared in March 2006 to great critical acclaim..
Kandel is a Viennese Jew by birth. At the age of nine he was forced to emigrate to the USA. In New York he studied Austrian history and literature, but later qualified in medicine and became a psycho-analyst. For 50 years he has been a neuro-scientist.
His research field, which is closely linked with his traumatic childhood experience during the Nazi era in Vienna and the Holocaust, is: the search for memory.
This film interweaves Kande"s life-story with the latest advances in
his neuro-science.
Together with Eric Kandel, who has devoted his life to the search for memory,
we set off on a very personal journey into his own memory, the memory of
one of the most important neuro-scientists of the 20th century. The journey
will take us to the external and internal locations of his childhood in
Vienna, to the exciting everyday laboratory life of the scientist at his
institute at Columbia University in New York, and right into the center
of the brain, to where our memories are stored.
A FILM
- about someone who set out to show at the highest scientific level that his personal memories were valid, as valid as a bio-chemical formula;
- about a Jewish childhood in Vienna before and after the Nazi takeover;
- about someone who researches the biology of the mind and who has proved that everything we experience changes the brain and even the genetic expression;
- about someone who is on the way to scientifically proving Freud"s theories;
- about the art of research and a scientist"s lust for life;
- about the latest state of memory research;
- about how one"s own biography determines the approach taken, and the questions posed, even by allegedly neutral scientific research;