Release Date: January 8, 2010 (NY)
Studio: Icarus Films
Director: Petra Seeger
“In Search of Memory” is a critically-acclaimed biographical documentary on the life and work of neuroscientist Eric Kandel, winner in 2000 of the Nobel Prize for Medicine for his research on the physiological basis of the brain’s memory storage.
Kandel, born in Vienna in 1929, emigrated to the U.S. at the age of nine to escape Nazi persecution. After early studies in history and literature, he focused on medicine and became a psychoanalyst before devoting his life, for the last fifty years, to neuroscience. 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. He relates his life story and scientific work in his award-winning autobiography, “In Search of Memory: The Emergence of a New Science of Mind,” in 2006.
The documentary interweaves Kandel’s life story with the latest advances in neuroscience. Petra follows Kandel on a very personal journey into his own memory, which takes us to the external and internal locations of his childhood in Vienna, using both archival footage and dramatic re-creations, to his laboratory work at Columbia University in New York, and, through his research, right into the center of the brain, as he explains where and how our memories are stored.
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