A Nobel Prize–winning neuroscientist’s probing investigation of what brain disorders can tell us about human nature
 
Eric R. Kandel, the winner of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his foundational research into memory storage in the brain, is one of the pioneers of modern brain science. His work has helped shape our understanding of how the mind works. Building from this scientific research, Kandel explores one of the most fundamental questions we face: How does our mind, our individual sense of self, arise from the physical matter of the brain? The brain’s 100 billion neurons communicate with one another through very precise connections. If those connections are disrupted, the brain processes that give rise to our mind can become disordered, resulting in diseases such as depression, schizophrenia, Parkinson’s, and autism.

The Disordered Mind illustrates how breakthrough studies of these disruptions can deepen our understanding of thought, feeling, behavior, memory, and creativity, and perhaps in the future will lead to the development of a unified theory of mind.
 
Contributor Bio(s)
 
Eric R. Kandel is the University Professor and Fred Kavli Professor at Columbia University and a senior investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. The recipient of the 2000 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, he is the author of The Age of Insight: The Quest to Understand the Unconscious in Art, Mind, and Brain, from Vienna 1900 to the Present, which won the Kreisky Award in Literature, Austria’s highest literary award; In Search of Memory, a memoir that won a Los Angeles Times Book Prize; and Reductionism in Art and Science: Bridging the Two Cultures, a book of the New York School of abstract art. He is also the coauthor of Principles of Neural Science, the standard textbook in the field.