There is Life After the Nobel Prize by Eric R.Kandel

 There is Life After the Nobel Prize

by Eric R.Kandel is a sunny book published by Columbia that I highly suggest to everyone. 

I found this man on the cover too sunny for not asking for a copy of this book at the Columbia Press.

This book is extremely accessible to everyone: Kandel expresses ideas, and concepts in a very simple way.

Winning a prize, an important prize, (not just the Nobel) for someone means the end of creativity. 

So, there was "extreme" worry in Kandel's wife when in 1996 Eric Kandel communicated her that the Nobel Commission was taking in considerations his work in neuroscience: "I hope not too soon" replied his wife. As seen by sociologists, people winning Nobel Prize, but again, also other important prizes, become more lazy and don't offer anymore anything of important to science or art. 

Kandel thought that if he would have won the prize, he would have acted differently. 

Born in Austria, because of the racial laws and the advent of the second world war, at just 9 years escaped from Austria with his parents finding a new home in the USA.

He entered at the Columbia University in 1974 where with other colleagues formed the Division of Neurobiology and Behavior. Kandel has been the first director of this department. 

Ten years later he also created at the Columbia thanks to the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, a department on molecular neural science. This department investigated how the brain works for trying to better its conditions when under stress, or under effects of drugs, because sick, etc: a second purposes involved psychiatry as well.

Kandel will let you understand how memory is created, stored by the brain seeing later what happens in a brain under effect of drugs, or invested by an illness complicated like schizofrenia is, and other clinical cases.

At the end Kandel won the Nobel Prize in 2000 but after that, as also promised to his wife, he didn't just stay home happy and satisfied of what done: no, he created a TV program at long transmitted for keeping neuroscience, problematics associated with brain, and how they can be sorted out, understable to a largest audience: he bought a house in Paris for his wife, although, admits he falls in love for Paris as well.

Once won the prize he received the call of the President of Austria. His reaction was sad. Austria hadn't wanted him: he escaped in a different country for building a beautiful existence: he is American, Kandel told to the President. The President of the country insisted and later, Kandel accepted to visit the country, accepting prizes, interacting with the researchers of the country, for rediscovering with serenity his country of origin.  Kandel's chapter on art and brain is also very interesting!

The book is pretty short, just 80 pages or so, but it is a wonderful reading: for understanding our brain but also the wonderful existence of this sunny man!

Highly recommended.

I thank Columbia University Press for the physical copy of the book.

Anna Maria Polidori