In Search of Memory

Filmmaker Petra Seeger's documentary profiles Columbia University neuroscientist Eric Kandel, a winner of the Nobel Prize for unveiling the cellular processes involved in the brain's memory storage. The upbeat, spry Kandel declares that the very act of watching this film will alter a viewer's biology, as new memory cells form to accommodate the cinematic experience. Kandel has promised his wife, Denise, a 50th-anniversary gift of a trip back to Europe, and Seeger accompanies the scientist and his family to Austria, where the Jewish Kandel household suffered persecution and ultimate expulsion at the hands of the Nazis (Denise was concealed as a child by righteous gentiles in a French convent). Intercut with dramatic re-enactments that evoke a world of Austrian Jewish culture lost to Nazi madness, the present-day Kandel is seen with his international team of research assistants, talking about experiments with enormous snails (possessing the biggest, most easily-managed cells) to grow memory-storage neurons under lab conditions. Kandel also waxes philosophically about reconciliation with his refugee past and about Judaism, a religion he says respects knowledge and does not deny scientific realities. Recommended. Aud: C, P. (C. Cassady)