Week 4 Study Questions on Kandel (to p. 276)

 

Each  member of  the  small groups should  briefly indicate what they found most striking in the reading; , the group as a whole should ultimately formulate a question for full seminar.

 

Q1  What role did Freud and Freudian Psychoanalysis  play in Kandel’s early intellectual life?  (p. 45-6, 55-56) What is the difference between behaviorism and Freudian psychoanalysis according to Kandel? (p. 40-2)To what extent did Freud (as Kandel writes about him) have a biological perspective on the mind?

 

Q2  What is Kandel’s account of the Golgi/Cajal dispute about neurons and its lessons? What was the scientific dispute between Cajal’s neuron doctrine and Golgi’a nerve net theory? What do his later comments about Sherrington/Adrian, Hodgkins/ Huxley  Dale/Loewi and the sparkers vs the soupers suggest about collaboration?   What, if anything do these incidents suggest about about scientific change?

 

Q3 According to Kandel, what is philosopher Karl Popper’s position about the nature of science? (p. 96)  How did Popper influence Eccles?  What do you think about Popper’s account about how science works (or at least should work)?

 

Q4  What role did the scientific research laboratory as a social organization play in Kandel’s life?       (p. 105).  To what extent is it illustrated in the historical instances he cites?

 

Q5  It has been argued that scientific “experimentalists” get a bad rap in the history of science.  Theoreticians, it is said, get laws named after them and have their names associated with important episodes of scientific change; the consummate practitioner with great technical skill are under-valued in this story.  From what you have read, what do you think Kandel might say about such a characterization?  What would you say based on his rendition of the history of neuroscience in the readings?

 

Q6  Kandel talks about the importance of picking an appropriate (simple) animal system (or animal model) in experimental research. (p. 107)  How is this illustrated in the cases he considers and in his own work on memory?

 

Q7 What was Lashley’s theory (law) of mass action (p 124 ff)?  How was it undermined, according to Kandel, by work on memory by Milner and Scoville on HM?   How does this work provide for the first time the biological basis of a psychoanalytic hypothesis?

 

Q8 How did Kandel come to realize that a “reductionist strategy” was needed in the study of memory and learning(p. 143)?  What does he seem to mean by the term “reduction?” What changes in his research strategy result from this realization?

 

Q9  Describe the stages or aspects of Kandel’s research on learning and memory in Aplysia. What were the major intellectual influences on his research?

 

Q10  What parallels did you observe between the ideas and motivies driving Nazi anti-Semitic policy and the ideas and motives driving American eugenics? What differences did you observe? Based on Kandel’s account, how did Nazi anti-Semitic policies in Germany and Austria influence the development of science?